Karen Titus Smith

Bio

Karen Titus Smith’s passion for form and light is immediately apparent in her still life oil paintings. Abstracted shadows and distorted light are rendered as lovingly as a bowl of lemons or a colorful bouquet, imbuing the scenes with quiet beauty and presence. Of her subject matter, she has said, “I create set-ups of simple objects that—with relationships of light, shape, form, color, and space—present something special, a bit of magic that I want to capture in paint.”

Karen earned her BFA from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, PA. She continued her studies, taking classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.

She taught visual art courses at several institutions, including the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and, most recently, the Arts Council of Princeton, the Paul Robeson Center in Princeton, NJ, and the Studio Classroom in Pemberton, NJ. She credits her teaching experiences for reigniting her interest in representational art, as her students requested practical demonstrations.

Karen has been exhibiting her work since the late 1980s. Her paintings were shown in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and represented by Artetude Gallery in Asheville, NC, Farnsworth Gallery in Bordentown, NJ, and online at the Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art. Her career as a painter for a major New York design firm has placed her work—often mural-sized—in exclusive four and five-star hotels and corporate spaces throughout the United States. Currently, her focus is on creating work in her studio in Pemberton, NJ.