Hello. My name is Karen Breunig. I am a Colorado artist and I have a piece in this show here at the Arvada Center. And my piece is called “Red Dress #2. And it’s quite a large piece, about , I think, it’s about 45, 46 by 60 inches And I did it in February of this year. It’s a piece that has really, kind of shifted the way that I’ve been working. It’s a work that’s done on a kind of paper called Yupo. Y-U-P-O. And yupo is a synthetic paper made with polypropylene so it basically comes from the oil and gas industry. It’s manufactured in Japan and it’s a paper that is non-absorbent and it resists stains. So it’s a very interesting paper to work with when you’re working in the different mediums I work in. This drawing is both charcoal, acrylic paint, graphite pencil, pigment sticks and oil paint. It’s a combination of all those things. And it kind of represents a breakthrough for me and some of the reasons it’s a breakthrough is because the yupo, because of its quality, it’s nonabsorbent quality, allowed me to work in a way where I could quickly wipe off the images I had put down and redo them as quickly as I wanted to. And it also allowed me to achieve a bit of transparency which was something I felt like I had been searching for. I wanted this piece to express some kind of transparency, some kind of, for lack of a better word, maybe an otherworldliness. I wanted it to not have the solidity of the works that I have done previous to this. So the yupo was really the perfect substrate for me to work on. And I did a lot of wiping out, a lot of allowing just the white of the paper to show through and I worked in short, choppy strokes which was also a new thing to me, to work that way. But I found that I got the intensity of the color I wanted by laying down smaller pieces of paint or of pigment sticks or of charcoal. And I really felt like I had been doing works related to this theme of the Red Dress for a year at least and I hadn’t gotten to a place where I felt like I was getting what I wanted. And I wasn’t even sure what I wanted. But when I did this piece I felt like I was closer to what I wanted.
And I have continued to work like this since that time. And the yupo has really helped me to be able to move forward in that way. Thank you.