LINELL SMITH: The Evening Sun: Baltimore: Painting Pictures is the Clouds: Karen Gunderson Puts Life in Cumulus: Thursday March 19, 1987

Baltimore- For 21 years, New York artist Karen Gunderson has painted only clouds.  This month, she has covered the walls of Grimaldis Gallery with cumulous of 10,000 feet, the magnificent clouds you see for two minutes of a plane trip: going up and coming down. 
Gunderson paints clouds that seem ready to embrace you.  Many of them seem strangely powerful, perhaps because they contain the forms, figures and emotions of life on earth.  The wind is not born that could scatter these clouds.  You wouldn’t wish it, either. 

“I was always afraid of heights,” Gunderson says.  “When I flew in a plane, I would imagine that I could land on the clouds if something happened to the plane… I imagine people being able to stand on my clouds.  In my paintings, you’re up there.  And it’s OK for you to be up there.”

As fits the nature of the subject, Gunderson’s clouds change shape before your eyes and before her, as well.  She wanders through her 15-painting exhibit with wonder and delight.
“This is a whole revelation to me,” she says.  “The light and color are very different than what I’ve been using.  I’m letting images come through the clouds now that I would have knocked out before in order to be more abstract and formal.  I’m allowing the paintings to have their own lives that way.

“As I work, I know that there’s a secondary image going on and that it’s coming out of some kind of emotional place.  So I’m letting it be.”

One bank of clouds has absorbed a landscape she admired last summer on a trip to Cape Cod.  In another, she sees boats returning to a harbor.  “The Quieting,” two cloud panels that join at the corner of the room, is about her husband’s decision to change jobs.