Go into the studio with abstract painter Aaron Karp

Editor’s note: This is the final “From the Studio” with Assistant Arts Editor Kathaleen Roberts, who is retiring this month.

Aaron Karp’s work dazzles.

Jewel-like shapes tumble across layer after layer of paint mapped out by tape. Fleeting star clusters crisscross and blaze. The canvas conceals and reveals. Color and space fractures to extract meaning.

Abstract painter Aaron Karp exhibits an extraordinary sense of playfulness

Known as one of New Mexico’s premier abstract painters, Karp’s career began in Albuquerque in the 1970s. He ping-ponged between jobs in New York (at the Guggenheim Museum) and museum director at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, before finally landing a job as an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the University of New Mexico.

When he won a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program grant, a colleague donated one of his pieces to New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Karp’s career exploded into a full-time profession.

“Things just took off,” he said.

The Guggenheim showed his work in their 1983 exhibition of “New American Paintings.”

To scroll through Karp’s various series is to gaze at multicolored orbs, the swirls of somersaults and silhouettes of birds in flight, animated by his extraordinary sense of playfulness.

It was in North Carolina that he developed a grid pattern using tape.

“I began to introduce tape to define the graph, the lines inspired by the uniqueness of patterns found in Mexican pottery,” he said. “And I really liked the geometry present in the way they were constructed.”

The tape acts as a stencil. Abstraction allows him to pursue his love of shapes.

He began in upstate New York by digging clay from the bottom of a creek at 10 years old. He molded a pot and a neighbor let him fire it in his kiln. Of course, it exploded. But the neighbor gave him some artist clay and it worked.

He was an art major at Buffalo State University, where he began producing wood engravings.

“It was something about the repetition of building up a surface,” Karp said.

He began painting in North Carolina and watched it evolve. He came to New Mexico in 1979.

Painting allows him to explore different shapes as he toggles between abstraction and representationalism, moving between geometry to recognizable forms.

His latest series “Perfect Season” reveals his unique style of layering and breaking the surface with a grid of masking tape patterning the subject with surprises of color and form.

Star clusters embed themselves within the layers.

“I collect shapes like people collect clothes,” Karp said. “It’s really research material. I’ll see something and I’ll make a stencil of it. I like shapes that are open, like doors or windows.”

In the series “Orchid Birds” he created profiles of various bird species in different poses.

“Using that vocabulary, I would layer these shapes to create an image,” Karp said.

“Bindi” is in tribute to his late standard poodle.

“It’s a star cluster painting,” Karp said.

With its pseudo-Celtic designs, “Disguise” actually derives from Japanese patterns.

“I think the Japanese refer to these shapes as fairy leaves,” he said. “It felt to me like things were tumbling.”

“Little Red” echoes some of the shapes he used in “Bindi,” always in motion.

“The stars are clustered in the painting,” Karp said. “Basically, it’s all star shapes. My paintings are about layering. I’m layering color. One shape blends into another.”

Karp’s work hangs in the Albuquerque Museum. His most recent exhibitions include shows at Duane Reed Gallery, St. Louis; William Havu Gallery, Denver; Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh, North Carolina; Duke University Fine Art Museum, Durham, North Carolina; Artspace/Virginia Miller Galleries, Coral Gables, Miami, Florida; LA Artcore, Los Angeles; New Concept Gallery, Santa Fe; Roswell Museum, Roswell; and Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago.