HARRISBURG – Paintings and drawings by Baltimore artist Mark Karnes are on exhibit Oct. 3-26 at the Rose Lehrman Art Gallery on the Harrisburg Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College. A lecture by the artist is scheduled 5:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6, in Whitaker Hall 214. A reception will follow in the gallery from 6:30-7:30 p.m. All events are free and open to the public.
“My work is about my connection to my surroundings,” Karnes said of his art. “The subjects of my pictures are things that are familiar and immediate to me. I paint and draw from life. It is an intimate view of those objects, spaces and people around me. I try to paint my subjects with an attentiveness to the particular qualities present in them.” Karnes works primarily in oil, sometimes in acrylic. He makes tiny black and white watercolor studies of his subjects reminiscent of the ink studies of the American abstract expressionist Richard 
Diebenkorn. These works reveal the artist’s ability to observe and reflect the same tonal information in his paintings.
Diebenkorn. These works reveal the artist’s ability to observe and reflect the same tonal information in his paintings.Karnes received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in painting from Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and a master’s degree in fine arts in painting from Yale University. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council as well as a Fulbright-Hayes grant for study in Florence, Italy. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in numerous private and museum collections, including the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Karnes has taught drawing and painting at Maryland Institute College of Art since 1974.
Fall gallery hours are 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday, 5-7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, or by appointment. For more information, call 717-780-2435 or email Kim Banister, gallery curator, at kebanist@hacc.edu. Visit the gallery on the HACC website: www.hacc.edu under the Rose Lehrman Arts Center and on Facebook.
The Rose Lehrman Art Gallery receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
