Karen Kitchel was born in 1957 in Battle Creek, Michigan, and now resides in Los Angeles, California. She has lived and painted in the western United States for over twenty years. She remembers, as a child in Michigan, transplanting plants for her grandpa to earn money. “This was my experience not only with an intimate relationship to plants but also order.” In 1979, she moved to Los Angeles to attend Claremont Graduate University, where her commitment to hand-crafted painting and land-based imagery developed.

American Grasslands was Kitchel’s first series. She started painting it while living in Montana, where she found most of the grasses within two miles of her house. It took Kitchel almost four years to complete all of the 12 x 12 inch paintings. She explains that she doesn’t just fill a painting in from top to bottom, that “there are all kinds of decisions that I lost or they got away from me or they are the decisions I decided that I didn’t want to keep, so there are all sorts of paintings here that are buried.” Using oil paints and small brushes, Kitchel meticulously lays out many layers of paint with long, steady strokes. The intense focus and very small, controlled movements required for her work have given her arm pain in the past, and she now braces her elbow against a computer wrist pad to paint.

For American Grasslands, Kitchel spent a lot of time looking carefully at different types of grasses, taking photos, and collecting samples. “I use my camera as a sketchbook. I take rolls and rolls of really bad photographs… I want just a really rough image to remind me of light direction and some botanical specifics,” she says. She included many types of grasses to reference the way that people relate to the landscape today. Rather than staring at one awe-inspiring vista, we often experience the land in a more scattered way—plants in the backyard, weeds between the sidewalk cracks, what we see when we glance out a car window. “The concept of the virgin landscape is a myth that goes back to the white settlement of this country,” says Kitchel. “I wanted to show the landscape as an inhabited place, and that it wasn’t a bad thing, it was just a true condition.”

Viewers sometimes wonder at first if these images are photographs, but each square is painted by hand. Kitchel seeks a balance in her precision—she wants her plants to be identifiable and also for her “hand” to be visible in her work. She gets a “chuckle” when her work is confused for photos because she feels she’s “enhancing and creating the wildest sort of fiction with these paintings.” She says, “I do want to encourage and seduce a point of view that will get you on your hands and knees looking at something like cheatgrass. I mean, a lot of the things I’m showing in my paintings, people spend a lot of money trying to kill.”