Johanna Karsnik - painter

funding 1997, 2004

I am a painter – I work full-time in my studio in Tottenham and without the generous support and encouragement of the Juliet Gomperts Trust I am not sure that this would be possible.

I think of myself as a narrative painter. In each of my paintings I am describing a specific narrative scene. I usually use images taken from a current newspaper but this social-realist source which is endemic to my paintings and is very important to me, is not initially obvious. Someone said of my work that it ‘impacts immediately but reveals slowly’ and this pleased me because I am concerned with a kind of picturing which is between abstraction and representation.

I think of the process of my work as an uncertain but obsessive attempt to delineate everything that is going on in a collapsing image and I hope to catch a sense of the energy of my chase after elliptical event. I feel that each of my paintings is a different mood piece characterised by my response to the particular source material I am using.

I like the sense that I am working under the inherited weight of the tradition of painting and I like the way that simultaneously with drawing on this tradition, my work with its specific concerns about fixing images and with the problems of perception also shares some of its preoccupation with other ‘post-modern’ artists working in less traditional media.

My first contact with the Trust was in 1997 when I was finishing my Foundation course at the City Lit and was awarded help with materials. In 2004 after completing my MFA course at Middlesex University I was granted a Special Patronage Award so that I could fund my studio for a year.

The time that this help gave me has been invaluable and I am still at the studio – still painting – still in contact with the trust and very grateful.