Karen Hackenberg

Karen Hackenberg earned her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978, and now lives and works on a quiet bay near Port Townsend, WA. She takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the serious subject of ocean degradation, painting meticulous seascapes of beach trash with oil and gouache.

Hackenberg’s paintings are inspired by the incongruity of the manmade detritus found washed up on the otherwise pristine beach below her studio—plastic shards, bottles, toy animals, shotgun shells, and consumer product packages. With her ear to the sand for a close view, and in a semi-documentary style, she poses and photographs the flotsam on the beach, and uses these photos as reference for her hyper-realistic paintings. Beach trash is made monolithic in the seascape and provides visual metaphor for the overwhelming magnitude and impact of marine debris.

Her work is influenced by Pop Art of the 1960s: Claes Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects, as well as Ed Ruscha’s paintings combining marketing graphics with images of nature. Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, including the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State Public Art Collection, New York State Museum, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, and Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, among others.