Meet Season 44 Visual Artist Karen Cox

(Photo: Rik Myslewski)

Karen Cox

Featured Visual Artist, Music at Kohl Mansion’s 44th Concert Season

Karen Cox is a Bay Area contemporary abstract artist whose work explores the relationships between color, structure, movement, and memory. Following a successful 35-year career in interior design, Karen embraced painting as a full-time creative pursuit, bringing her keen understanding of composition and space to works in acrylic, oil, encaustic, collage, and mixed media.

Karen’s paintings are distinguished by their layered surfaces and dynamic interplay of geometric forms and expressive mark-making. Her artistic philosophy—“Be bold and fearless in your art”—encourages both experimentation and personal interpretation, inviting viewers to discover their own stories within each piece.

A resident artist at Art Bias in San Carlos, Karen has exhibited throughout the Bay Area and actively participates in the region’s vibrant arts community. Her work often draws inspiration from the patterns and rhythms of everyday life, transforming familiar landscapes and experiences into imaginative abstract compositions.

Her featured work for Music at Kohl Mansion’s 44th Concert Season, City Life, unfolds as a calculated dance of shapes and colors, where geometry takes on the pulse of an ever-awake urban landscape. Its horizontal layout invites the eye to travel across dynamic angles and intersects, teasing out a rhythm that’s part architecture, part conversation. Blocks of gray anchor the composition, while bursts of teal, purple, orange, and red add a spontaneous hum—like city lights flickering against a twilight sky.

The painting tilts, to be caught mid-motion—edges leaning into one another, locked in a tension that’s energizing rather than chaotic. It’s an abstract portrayal that doesn’t try to illustrate city life but rather captures its essence: the push and pull, the layering of moments and moods, the unexpected flashes that turn the mundane into something lively and unpredictable. 

Karen’s work celebrates the shared language of the visual and performing arts, making her an inspiring artistic partner for Music at Kohl Mansion’s 44th Concert Season. 

(Photography: Rik Myslewski )