Karen Fakouri

 I have loved art forever and used to wish I could sketch as I had seen my father do.  I studied Art History in Paris for two years and that love grew stronger.  When my daughter began drawing as soon as she could hold a pencil, I said it skipped a generation.
Following a divorce, I returned to school to study interior design and was forced to draw and render. To my surprise, I found I could really enjoy producing various types of art. Throughout the years that I worked as a designer, I continued to take classes to improve my drawing skills and became enamored of working in graphite. My problem was, I wanted to produce photo quality pieces and could not seem to loosen up and work in a more abstract direction.
With the onset of a pandemic in 2020, I set up a studio and began to work full time to learn to use acrylics. Again I was working toward photo quality and only after watching several videos on using liquid acrylics, did I discover a way to work in a more abstract way. With liquid acrylics you need to let the paint direct you and work with that. No two pieces will be the same and I am learning to “go with the flow” and combine various methods along with personal embellishments to create pieces that are fun as well as challenging for me.
This is now my passion and I love to imagine what to try next. I have scraped a lot of canvases to start over, but that is fine. What comes next will be a new adventure!  I am grateful to have discovered a supportive group at Fogue Studios who realize that an artist is not diminished by age, but enhanced by life’s long journey.