Karen Sperling's
Magical Mystical Tour series

Art Beyond Reality and Imagination

Art Stands Out

Contemporary Relevance

Powerful, Gorgeous, Complex Abstracts

Artist Statement

Since my childhood in New York, I've had a recurring dream in which
the expansive highways leading to gigantic bridges turn into roller coasters
as I travel over them. The Magical Mystical Tour series stems from this
idea of highways turning into roller coasters.

The series also stems from my enjoyment as a child of books like
Alice in Wonderland, where characters can go through mundane household
objects like mirrors and find other worlds.

When my friend artist Laurence Gartel looked at my paintings in this
series, he said they looked mystical to him because he had just returned
from the funeral of his friend, artist Nam June Paik.

I said yes, that's exactly what these paintings are, Magical Mystical Tours,
a takeoff on the Beatles song title.

I was also interested to learn that Georgia O'Keeffe, whose birthday and
mine are 2 days--and several decades--apart also saw her art as mystical, like
the art of Kandinsky, whose book about mystical art she read throughout
her lifetime. I didn't know it when I started this series that stems from my
traditional charcoal abstracts, but Georgia O'Keeffe also drew charcoal abstracts.

Even finding all of these connections is an example of a Magical Mystical
Tour, and what I am trying to conjure up in these paintings.

The first image, Stairway, is the beginning of the tour, and the rest
of the paintings are the journey along the way.

You see some recognizable elements like roller coasters and highways,
sort of like signposts in a strange world where you also see things that
I may or may not have put there, based on your own ideas and perceptions.

While as the artist I'm the tour guide, presenting these little journeys,
the viewer really determines the ride's meaning to him or her--the tours
will mean different things to different people, like Rorschach ink blots.

As the tour guide, my hope is that viewers will get that feeling I get
when I stand in front of a painting in a museum that "sends me," like the
work of the Abstract Expressionists, Futurists and Surrealists--that
feeling that you're going both inside the painting and inside yourself.

Though the first dictionary definition of mystic relates to religious
experience, it's the last several entries I intend for my Magical Mystical
Tour series: inspiring a sense of mystery and wonder; mysterious, strange;
enigmatic, obscure.

Recent Exhibitions

Copyright 2008 Karen Sperling. All rights reserved. No text or images may be
reproduced in any form without written permission from Karen Sperling.