U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE ART IN EMBASSIES PROGRAM An Exhibition of Conteemporary Art By and About Women

"The entire series of paintings- Aren’t We All Beautiful Colors?- began with twenty-four of them entitled A Couple Dozen Roses.  When I first began these paintings in 19991, I first painted black roses- twelve of them- then covered them with singular colors of paint- the color of roses- and titled them, using their individual colors as their names, i.e.  clear red rose.  Each of the black underpaintngs is painted from life and each color laid on top is very close to the colors of roses that I found to paint from.

For the next twelve I wanted to push the idea of color.  Not just color for color’s sake or pretty colors, but color as a whole ideology about all of us.  I wanted to show the varieties of colors that we are- as roses are.  I named them all after old friends."

-Karen Gunderson, 1995