Category: issue nine

Karen Glykys

Maidstone, Kent, UK
www.zealous.co/karenglykys/portfolio
@karenglykys

I am a self taught, emerging, Mixed Media Artist. I started producing art and exhibiting professionally in 2017. Taking a brief hiatus in 2019 to recover from a brain hemorrhage, which had a profound effect on my art practice and outlook on life in general.

My Art practice became both therapeutic and healing. My influences and reference points are vast and complex. Drawn from my London City upbringing, sexuality, my stroke, human interactions, music and fascinations My images, saturated in colour, a hang over from album sleeves, TV, video and movie special effects from the era I grew up in. Starting life from an early age in the performing arts; of Film and Television, I landed in a cradle of creativity.

But later worked in the music business, finance and the Probation service, so my art practice came late in life to me. If I had to name influences I would say photographers Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Patty Carroll and Robert Doisneau. Artists that inspire me include Werner Buttner, Norman Rockwell, Francis Bacon and Jean – Michael Basiquiat.

But I also delight in the visceral brutishness of Artemisia Gentileschi and the surreal world inhabited by Leonora Carrington I am adventurous and experimental, both on canvas and behind the lens. I am labelled an automatic artist, unless commission to great a desired image, my work just unfolds unplanned and organic.

I create Pop Art and Abstract work; stylised illustrations and sketches, using oil sticks, brush markers, charcoal and acrylics. I am a pioneer of British Smartphone Photographic PhoneArtists. Under strict control parameters I am pushing the boundaries of Smartphones and free android apps to the limit. I never use preset effects or photoshop, preferring the creative freedoms that playing with light, colour and contrasts can bring. Whilst exploring the possibilities of the digital medium as a permanent extension to ourselves, through which the creative process is immediately accessible to everyone.

This work is produced entirely from photographic images, shot and edited on the tiny screen of my smartphone and only sees a PC to resize for printing or colour checking. Hence the resultant resultant body of my work in this field now sits under my banner – #tinyeyeproject.