Karin Olah works on canvas, linen, and paper, creating her signature collage paintings as a way to connect with America’s quilt making heritage. Using fabric, often antique textiles, the artist works in a manner that mimics the flow of paint from a brush. Intricately cut, placed, and pasted threads overlap one another and become the paintings’ stories. Much of the artist’s palette pairs historical Charleston colors with lush complementary tones selected from her vast fabric collection. Translucent layers of cottons, silks, and linens blend with opaque calligraphic brushstrokes as graphite lines intersect the surface. Karin finishes many of the compositions with a dance of colorful encircling thread.

Karin Olah’s style is a tangible patchwork of her experiences. From a small-town upbringing in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, her interest in Amish quilts and textile traditions led her to study Fiber Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. For several years following art school, Karin managed a textile studio in New York City, developing colors and patterns for clients, including Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, and Peter Marino Interior Architects. Now applying her fabric know-how to the realm of painting, Karin finds her collage art featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the Southeast. Her work has been featured in American Contemporary Art, Art Business News, Charleston Style & Design, and Charleston Magazine, on the covers of Black & White: Birmingham City Paper and Carolina Arts, and as the image for the Charleston Farmers Market 2006 and 2007 posters and street banners. Corporate Collections include pieces in the Carolina Contemporary Collection of MUSC Ashley Towers, Citadel College, City of Charleston – Office of Cultural Affairs, and Shoestring Publishing Company. Karin is a board member of Charleston Arts Coalition and Redux Contemporary Art Center.

Artist Statement -

"My work falls into many categories. It can be described as painting, or collage art, or fiber art. My compositions borrow design principals from quilt making, Abstract Expressionism, aerial photography, American realism and landscape painting, wrought iron-work, and the architectural details seen in and around Charleston where I live. Also things like graffiti art, calligraphy and cursive handwriting, fashion, and language inform my work.

In history, quilt makers used the sights in the world around them as shapes and symbols in their work. I do the same, but I also look, in particular, for the abstract shapes that come into focus.

In my most recent series, my work takes its cue from the natural world Ð especially the bloom of flowers in spring and summer. I am using themes of growing, reaching, blossoming, and balance in this new series. Outside the windows of my studio in Wagner Terrace, I watch as the kudzu takes a hold of everything in its path - pulling itself up, reaching for more sun, and growing strong. While I paint this body of work, kudzu weaves and intertwines with the fence, jumps to the roof, and creeps its way to the windows that I watch it from. Perhaps I should put down my scissors and pick up the hedge trimmers? I hear that kudzu can grow up to a foot in a day. Though, these flowers are unusual and abstract, they too sprout, look for more sun, and reach for more space. The blooms weave, unravel, and defy the limits of the canvas by wandering onto the gallery wall.

On an airplane, I am transfixed by the geometry of farms, the calligraphy of rivers, the shadow and texture of clouds, the string of highways, and the gentle drape of vegetation on mountains.

On a train, I am enamored with the changing scenery - the blurring of rural farmland into suburban sprawl and urban cityscapes. From green quilted blocks of plowed fields to graffiti racing by in long cursive sentences, I’m borrowing all the shapes and colors that I see on my trips.

In Charleston, when you drive over the bridges, you see a bird’s-eye-view; where local islands, rivers, and marshes spread out in the distance. It’s a very flat perspective of colors - blue, silver, aqua, green, creamy whites and neutral tones. You see the sky mirrored in the waterways and you see loose threads of rivers circling the islands. Picturesque downtown is full of inspiring colors and subjects: pastel colored mansions, wrought ironwork, historic churches, palmetto trees, cobblestone alleys, and the deepest blue sky. It’s the kind of stuff that influences my work – albeit from a new and abstract viewpoint.

I’ll spend an afternoon sketching a wrought-iron church gate, then return to my studio to make it my own – by collaging fabric on top. Those shapes – the curls and scrolling decorations - will later emerge in the larger abstract collages on canvas. Usually one finished painting dictates the direction of the next. When I cut out a shape, I am left with a negative space in the fabric, often a reverse shape or maybe a twin. I collage both parts – the positive and the negative.

Look closer at my work and you’ll see that there is no sewing. The layers are applied with an archival paste similar to that used in bookbinding. I burnish it onto the stretched canvas or linen support, sometimes leaving a stay thread to do it own thing. I work in layers, starting with an undercoat of light paint, and then drawing in pencil, then more painting, then layering on fabric, up to 5 layers deep with edges overlapping and strips woven into one another.

I love the implications of working with textiles. There is something very intimate and domestic about it. My work is really an exploration of material and abstraction. It’s about many visual influences seen in my world as well as a history that came before it."