The Artist
Karin has received several awards for her work, including First Prize Best of Show at UxShow in Uxbridge (one out of over 600 applicants), Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grants, the Leading Edge Award, Kitchener, Ontario, and the Waterloo Regional Arts Foundation Exhibition Assistance Grant.
Karin’s work has been in exhibitions at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Grimsby Public Art Gallery, Dale Smith Gallery, Ottawa, and the Robert Langen Gallery at Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario.
Karin’s work is part of many private collections in Canada.
Karin Rabuka
I am constantly reminded that our landscape and the communities that we live in are so closely tied to one another in a fragile relationship. Our Canadian landscape is greatly compromised and changed by development and population growth. Where a field in my neighbourhood once stood still with deer grazing upon it, it now supports a row of houses.
My artwork attempts to highlight these changes with a twist of visual comic relief. I choose to paint scenes that I am familiar with – scenes from my neighbourhood and home. The role I have been given as a mother also plays a part in my work as I visually comment on this role through images of home. I try to use a lighthearted visual style of painting by using simplification and arresting colour.
I have been making artwork all of my life. While spending most of my growing up years in Nova Scotia, Canada, much of my interest in art was started by drawing on rocks at our seaside cottage.
I later attended the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario and earned a Bachelor of Arts, Honours, in Fine Art Studio Specialization. Since then I have practiced art as a full, then part-time business with a home studio in Kemptville, Ontario (near Ottawa).