Karen Gunderson loves the water. Whether she’s boating north up the Hudson River or taking the ferry across Lake Michigan, she’ll always leave her warm, comfy seat and make her way to the bow to watch the waves part in front of her. “In sunlight, water can take on color and appear blue or green,” Gunderson tells Observer. “But when you look at the shadows below the boat, the water is black.”
Gunderson looks completely at home in black, playing with shades and values unlike any other artist working today. In the 21st century, it is easy to point out that artists have already mastered all possible forms of traditional analogue drawing. Whether the medium is oil, acrylic, tempera, ink, etc., the collaboration between paint, brush and palette knife has been thoroughly explored and perhaps completely exhausted. All creators can do to explore new frontiers in 2026 is pick up a tablet with Procreate installed. But Gunderson, 82, does not accept this hypothesis. Through her continuing explorations, she invented a pioneering method of manipulating paint, light and shadow to create the illusion of movement in two-dimensional works.
Born in Racine, Wisconsin, she decided to pursue art as a career during her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. “I was originally going to study childhood education and took art classes as part of that curriculum,” she explains. “My teachers saw the drawings and cornered me. They insisted that I major in art.” There happens to be a rare concentration of talent in the small rural art program, according to Gunderson. Eleven of her classmates have moved on to graduate programs in the arts. She enrolled in the advanced art program at the University of Iowa to study under Hans Breder, a pioneering artist who worked across multiple media.
Breder’s freedom to experiment allowed Gunderson to work with everything from oil paint to acrylic sheets arranged in three-dimensional spaces. Many of those early works focused on clouds. “It was a natural choice because it was Iowa,” she says. “All we saw were clouds most of the year.” This early work with natural, flowing sky forms would eventually evolve into the moving black paintings that define Gunderson’s work in the 21st century. (Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Frank has compiled a study of her work entitled The dark world of lightreleased in 2016.) examines the changing patterns of water while revealing the unexpected complexity within the color black itself. “There are so many shades of black,” she explains. “Peach black is the darkest paint I use. But there is ivory black, and glossy black. Each black has its own identity and subtle colors that pop in the light.”
Thus, properly hanging one of Gunderson’s paintings requires installing a precisely targeted lighting setup. When light hits carefully vertical and horizontal brushstrokes, the patterns “move” as the viewer walks toward, away from, or around the painting.
“I work from the photos I take,” she says. “I find the image that suits me. It’s just a feeling about what I want to show. And I want to create the idea of movement in the piece. I draw what the edges of the wave are, but I don’t stick to that because it would be too busy and too lost. I choose larger shapes to create a sense of the shapes and what I want the painting to be.”
When they are not moving around the work to experience its kinetic illusions, first-time viewers of Gunderson’s black paintings often assume that thick, shaped paint has been applied to the canvas in imitation of the multiple layers of Van Gogh or Pollock. Closer examination reveals that its work consists of thin two-dimensional layers.
“I want to have the energy of paint in the work,” she adds. “Instead of having normal brush marks and letting the recognizable elements become the image — when you don’t really see the energy — I really want to be able to see the movement and life of the water. This interest probably developed while I was growing up in Wisconsin, near the Great Lakes.”
Heading into 2026, the Milwaukee Art Museum is redesigning much of its gallery space, rotating some pieces from the walls and introducing new objects. Gunderson recently made a gift to Waves are coming homeFrom 2025 to the museum collection. “The museum and my family have a mutual friend and a wonderful curator, Maggie Adler,” she explains. “Maggie has been a huge support, and she works with Kristen Gaylord [curator of photography and media arts at MAM]. They told me they kind of fell in love with my work.
Gunderson, represented by Yancy Richardson, relishes knowing that her paintings will hang in the most prominent galleries in her home state alongside fellow Wisconsin legends the museum supports, such as Georgia O’Keefe and Frank Lloyd Wright. when Waves are coming home Moving from its current home between new acquisitions to its final long-term home in the Santiago Calatrava-designed complex, Gunderson hopes to return to oversee the lighting setup to ensure the work is lit to full effect. “I don’t get to come home very often from my exhibition in New York,” she says. “If I have the opportunity to return, I look forward to bringing my husband, son and his family to share in this work to find their home.”
More technical interviews
