We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Linda Pearlman Karlsberg. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Linda below.
Hi Linda, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I interact with lots of different subject matter through my artwork; I repeatedly engage with varied bodies of work that include portraits, landscapes, still lifes, skies, nude figure studies, dancers and a series devoted to women who speak truth to power. I find it rewarding and stimulating to rotate my attention among these thematic genres as a means to explore my experiences in and of the world. It has allowed me to express both personal and universal themes of love and loss, and the challenges of being a woman in our time. I have interrogated the unfairness of the world, the fragility of ecosystems and climate while also celebrating its stunning beauty. Light is always a catalyst for my artwork, and the conflicts of light and shadow and the emotional responses light provokes underpin all the work. Ultimately, my varied subjects provide arenas in which to give form to my experience of being alive at this time in this place and to pursue images that express the fullness of being human.
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 engage with varied subject matter through my drawings and paintings, as a means of investigating my experience in the the world and expressing meaning derived from my experiences.
During Covid and continuing, I developed a very personally driven series of charcoal drawings entitled She Spoke Up that celebrate and elevate the work and words of extraordinary women past and present, who have spoken truth to power, pursued freedom and equity, and transformed the broader world. Collectively the series stands as a response to so much misogyny, ill-intent, sexism and obstruction that has and continues to play out in cultural, social and political arenas.
The series reflects on the struggles and inequities of the past, underscores the fundamental challenges that still exist, highlights the transformative achievements of intelligent, courageous women, and suggests possiblities for our tomorrows.
I also delve deeply into portraiture. I have always found it personally compelling as an arena in which to explore the range of human experience, its fragility, emotion and strength. In portraying individuals at different ages and life stages I engage themes of temporal change, individual vulnerability and human mortality. I reflect moments of inquisitiveness, strength, calm or vulnerability; traces of self-protection and openness; or glimmers of hopefulness, pride and earnestness. As I preserve a time and moment in the subject’s evolution, I acknowledge the tumultuous forces and inevitable unstoppable sea of change we ride in life.
A series focused on the skies is ongoing as well, and is a realm in which I explore the magical and physical beauty all around us, as well as the metaphorical drama and emotions that I find in the interplay of clouds and light. Skies offer the unique challenge of describing infinitely variable light, color expression and forms that appear three dimensional but also porous, translucent or reflective. My skies series, dependent on one moment’s light, are also about temporality in nature and our lives. In these artworks I hope to evoke the metaphorical display of life’s fragility, to give testament to life’s volatility and emotional range.
In fact all my portfolios of paintings and drawings; portraits, landscapes, water lilies, still lifes, dancers, figure studies and more are spheres in which to explore my lived experience and to tease out themes of love and loss, human yearning, vulnerability and personal agency.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
The mission to be creative, to engage with the world around me through visual language, has always been a part of me. I was drawing, painting, creating and taking art lessons outside of school from third grade on. For as long ago as I can remember there was a drive to reflect on my experiences in the world, to isolate and capture what I saw through a visual exploration and manifestation. There were scholarships to classes at the Boston Museum School and Mass Art throughout high school, and in college after exploring other options, I committed to a Painting major. Then years of teaching at Boston University and other area colleges followed as I tried also to establish my own process and practice as a visual artist.
It is not easy to be self-supporting as a visual artist. Teaching was a means to achieve a dependable income and to share my love of the disciplines I had long studied. Eventually though my husband, who is a professional photographer, and I opened a commercial photographic studio, which supported us and our family as it grew. As I had my children, additional challenges arose; how to find time for my own work in the studio, as well as continue my role in our photography business and still be the mother to three young children in the way that I wanted to be. Again, It is not easy to balance all these roles and choices and our society does not make childcare affordable or readily available for working parents. It was often a game of trade-offs and juggling.
What I would say about those years when it was not possible to produce my own work, is that my ideas were always percolating and evolving. The visual lens through which I viewed the world was always in gear, a flow of images were noted, gathered and stored even if unrealized on the page or canvas. As I grew in my life and in all my roles, my new and varied life experiences informed the work when I started to produce artwork again. With these new experiences as a mother and a woman in the workplace my ideas, inspirations and motivations evolved and my emotional sensitivities enlarged.
The following has held true throughout all of my years as a visual artist; I am captivated by the magic of light on form, by the expressive possibilities that light and shadow afford and by the wonder of a process in which drawn or painted marks create a three dimensional form from nothing. And that somehow in the choices made in subject matter, in lighting or viewpoint, I could deepen the emotional expression in the work.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
As a visual artist one is always also working to find opportunities to show and share your artwork outside the studio. Calls for art continually flow from galleries, local museums, art centers and art organizations staging exhibits and seeking artwork. Usually exhibitions are themed and one can find themes that align with current or past work and areas of focus. However, from the very beginning one must learn to be resilient and to not take the inevitable and frequent rejections of your submissions or applications too personally. It often feels very painful and depressing to learn that your work has not been selected by the juror or chosen by a museum or gallery director, when you felt your work spoke directly and elegantly to the subject of the exhibition.
Every year multiple emails arrive in my in box conveying that my work was not invited to this or that exhibition that I deemed special or particularly important for my niche in the art world. It is definitely an “ouch” moment. However, one must remember that you have no idea what excites the curator or juror or what their aesthetic vision may be or how they envision shaping the full exhibition. Fortunately acceptances appear as well; invitations to show and participate materialize too if one is persistent.
Rejection is a fact of life for creatives in many of the arts. We don’t get paid for our years of effort in the studio, for the time spent evolving and developing our skill and ideas, or for the endless hours spent honing our bodies of work. In addition, unlike most jobs, being a visual artist is very solitary and the dialog about the work’s progress is mostly with oneself and ongoing in your own head. I have had to repeatedly steal myself for the inevitable refusals and what can often feel like the world’s indifference; and to strengthen my commitment to my own vision and creative journey. It is essential to fortify my trust in my efforts and myself, and to reinforce my own work’s value.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lindapearlmankarlsberg.com
- Instagram: lindajpk
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LindaPearlmanKarlsberg/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-pearlman-karlsberg-07258314/
