About
Scottish Landscape Painter
I love to create bright colourful paintings of the Orkney landscape. I have always felt a sense of belonging to this place and I love to spend my time outdoors walking and painting here. As well as painting the vast views I like to include the details closer to where my feet stand, and really what drives me to create art is the feeling of being outside immersed in the wilds of Orkney that I can’t quite put into words and so I paint it.
My favourite way to work is on my bigger acrylic paintings layering up colour and pattern to create an image that I think sits somewhere between what’s real and a dream of remembered colours and light and I hope that the viewer can sense the same feeling in my work.
Karen Laird is an Orcadian landscape artist currently living and working in Orkney.
Karen studied Glass at Edinburgh college of Art gaining her BA(hons) in design and applied arts before studying Painting at Leith School of Art where she was awarded the painting course prize.
Her paintings have featured in numerous juried exhibitions, including the Jacksons Painting Prize, the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize at the Mall galleries in London, as part of the Aberdeen Artist Society annual show at Aberdeen Museum and Art Galleries, and as part of the Scottish Society of Artists, the Royal Scottish Society of painters in Watercolour and Visual Arts Scotland annual exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.
In 2025 she was awarded funding from Creative Scotland to complete a month long artists residency at Links house in Birsay from which she is now creating a new body of work.