Karen Cygnarowicz

Karen Cygnarowicz

Painter/writer

Karen Cygnarowicz is a painter, writer & (currently) a world traveler.  She donated her possessions, sold her car, and is backpacking in Southeast Asia.  She’ll be home by Christmas, but in the meantime she is creating whenever she can.  Her main medium is acrylic and pens – though on the road she has focused on watercolors, ink and digital drawing.  She is even working remotely towards her MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.   Per Karen – “proof that education is possible, even in the dingiest of hostels.”

Karen is an exercise in color and finding oh-so-many ways to express herself.  Further, she is evidence that travel is a medium worth pursuing.

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In Karen’s words:

“My experience living out of a backpack has been as freeing as my artwork beckons. My partner and I do not spend too much time planning much like I don’t have a routine for my writing or painting.

“In my poetry, I still stay true to my authentic voice in my attempts to describe the beauty around me, calling on the differences in a new culture and myself in it.

“In my visual art, my color palette has changed over the last few years and more recently in these last few months. I have been fortunate to bare witness to this experience in the changing seasons (growing up in Maryland) and regions (in my own move to Vermont), within my own sense, my own home.

“But then I took the leap into the unknown, across the great sea, and the blues are bluer, the greens are green. I am not admitting to feeling content here. The itch still itches.”

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Works below (C) 2014 Karen Cygnarowicz

Karen Cygnarowicz is an artist and writer currently backpacking her way through Southeast Asia.  You can see more of her work on her portfolio site and instagram.