We recently connected with Karen Fitzgerald and have shared our conversation below.

Karen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

A year or two out of graduate school, I was struggling with compositional challenges on a set of nine 72″ x 54″ paintings. One was particularly vexing – I’d run out of ideas for solving the conundrum. My stretcher maker passed through the studio to deliver an order to my studio mate. I complained about compositional woes; that’s how it goes, he said. The next day he returned to complete the order delivery and brought me a gift: a scrap round panel from his production studio. It had a hole in the center, which I patched. I stretched a piece of paper on it and tried my compositional challenge. The problems vanished, and I realized it was the corners of the rectangular plane causing my challenges. I called him and ordered nine 54″ diameter panels and have never looked back.

Working on the tondo form feels like home. Many artists report trying the form and hating it. Collectors are sometimes hesitant to add a round painting to their walls. It is easy to find those who are adventurous and will embrace the format. It matters that this form is present in the world – its ability to gently remind us of our inter-connectivity is unsurpassed. I consider this an important subtext for this moment in world history.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve been an artist all my life. I left home at 18 to study art. Growing up on a dairy farm in the Midwest, I was close to the natural world. It remains a source of not only inspiration, but sustenance, resonance, and beauty.
When I was 25, I moved to New York City. I completed 2 master’s degrees, driving a cab to pay bills. My attachment to the visual arts industry has gone through several alterations. At this point, I am most interested in working directly with clients. I have a large inventory of work that I offer, I also work on a commission basis. Selling artwork is not like selling socks. There is a wide range of what motivates someone to purchase a work of art. It is important to me that I develop a relationship with my clients. I write about my work – the visual language is just that. It’s important to connect the dots of my thinking with what the viewer is looking at, to start a conversation about that experience. Poetry is another touchstone that is at the core of the work. Metaphorical language is deeply powerful and can be transformative. I’ve been building that ineffability into the work for years.
A core belief regarding my business is that artwork is a broad conversation. It is a language that encompasses human experience in all the realms this manifests: psychologically, emotionally, physically, spiritually. Owning a piece of artwork is an embarkation on this extended conversation. Different thoughts occur each time I look at something in my collection. Someone once said that sharing an artwork is like sharing a portion of one’s brain, one’s soul. This may be true, but the more important aspect of this comment is that the depth with which artwork sparks experience and conversation is not one-off. It’s not transactional. It requires as much from you as what the artist has brought to the breath within their work. Artwork is part of our consciousness, and when we approach it with this in mind, the rewards are often profound.
In the late 1980’s I began working on the tondo form. Since 2006, I include gilded areas. Working with precious metals (23k, 12k gold, silver, copper) gives the surfaces a dynamic quality that mimics the roil of energy we live within. We may not see this roil, but it is there in the weather, in our relationships, in our bodies. Sometimes there is recognizable imagery in the work, other times it is quite abstract. Often abstract qualities coexist with representational reference. In my work, energy is the coin of the realm.
Mid-2024 I moved my studio. I am now near where I live, next door. I worried I would miss the gorgeous light of my old workspace, that my audience would not find me. That has not happened – the new space has equally sublime light across the day. Our open studio in late 2024 was well attended. I can watch the bird life in the back, and one cannot argue with my commute! New work is coming out now – see especially “Pond,” a 42” diameter painting incorporating 23k gold.
(If you would like to see more of my work please reach out. My excellent marketing manager Sophia has designed a beautiful, small catalog that introduces the different bodies of work. We would be happy to mail you a hard copy of this catalog: get in touch.)

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

While the art market functions within an economy and appears as transactional as all other products/service, it is not. Artists will be supported when society understands this basic tenet of all artworks (e.g., dance, theater, music, etc.) Artists make work outside of the transactional economy. There are a variety of reasons artists produce work, but mostly, we make work because we don’t really have a choice. It’s our central purpose, the thing that drives joy and happiness in our lives. When we sell work, there can be an enormous amount of tension between transaction and purpose – it can feel like fitting a square peg into a round hole.

In mid-2024, I completed a public mural at 84th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, NYC. It was the second part of a project begun last year. The work from 2023 is 18’ x 40.’ This year, the mural soared to 54’, at 18’ wide. As a collaborative effort, I worked with students and administrators from two organizations, CITYarts and the Urban Assembly for Green Careers. At the surface, this project appears to be a transactional effort: I was paid a flat fee to work with students, solicit ideas, organize and compose those ideas, and fabricate the mural, managing a small team of assistants. Once you scratch that surface, the transactional qualities disappear. What rises to the surface are the riches of collaboration and cooperation. Ideas presented by the high school students, conversations with the community, and attending adjustments to the final design exhibit a course of exchange, rich in interpretive understandings.

Many of my close artist friends have read Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift. It discusses what a gift economy might look like. From the purgatory of capitalism, it’s a shining light on the horizon, an idea about exchange that is not transactional. Native cultures around the world understand this kind of economy, and while capitalism might seem dominant no matter where one looks on the globe, at a local level, gift economies are alive. Our society will better support artists when it understands the essence of the gift economy and encourages the networks that make a gift economy grow and blossom.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

As an artist, I am frequently sharing ideas with other artists. Conversations are rich, not just with shop talk (the how-to of making and marketing) but also with the substance of our inner lives. What we think about, what we value, who we are reading and how these other experiences come into our work. As a poet might say, it is the air and breath of our work.
When I can extend this conversation with someone who is interested in the work the circle feels full and rich. Our inner worlds and outer worlds are not always accessible one to the other. Nor should they be. Yet, for me, it is important to bring along some pieces from each world into the other world. That balance and flow is constantly negotiated, and a rich source of balancing, that thing everyone is always talking about!

Contact Info:

• Website: http://fitzgeraldart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kbfitzgeraldart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FitzgeraldArt/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-fitzgerald-585611a/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_NRKRqAk4A

Image Credits

Sun Shadow portrait courtesy of Sung Won.
Artwork images courtesy of the Artist.