Karen Schwartz is an Atlanta based artist who is currently represented by Hathaway Contemporary in Atlanta. She also works on Long Island and exhibits with Brooklyn gallery David and Schweitzer Contemporary and the New York City gallery Yours, Mine, and Ours. Schwartz’s previous representation was with The Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta and Life on Mars Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has also appeared in juried and solo exhibitions in other cities and abroad. Her portraits and landscapes are held in private and corporate collections. In the past year, Schwartz has drawn from an unconscious well of experience, as well as from live observation of the human face and figure that predominated her subject matter and dictated her use of photographs and live models for paintings and drawings. She also experimented with small works on paper in addition to her usual large scale paintings. These small works ended up being a transition to working from “what was inside instead of what could be looked at outside.” Schwartz describes the shift: “As soon as I stopped working from the figure, what was inside of me started coming out.” Through these shifts, Schwartz has come to view painting as a way of making sense, a way of making implicit experience explicit, of giving form to what is unformulated: “I don’t set out with a preconceived agenda or narrative when I paint, but work to be mindful about discovering meaning in my process, my way of going about making a painting.” Schwartz’s previous work reveals her exploration of abstract handling of the human figure and a continuing and abiding interest in human character and connectedness as expressed through gesture, pose, and implied movement and emotion. Her mixed media portraits on paper and canvas of personally known and cultural figures are up close character studies that create psychological impact with a distinctive use of line and color. The work manifests a trust in what "eyes and hand will tell about my subjects" and embodies a risk that pays off in honesty and bold expression. Schwartz’s dual practices in art and psychotherapy clearly inform one another and have been key to her fascination with creative process in both endeavors. Her experience as a clinical psychologist practicing psychotherapy from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective for over 25 years reflects an enduring passion and respect for personal idiosyncrasy that characterizes her early portrait work, the more recent and abstract, life-size human figure paintings, and now, her turn to the reservoir of personal experience within.