About Sam Karres
 
Born in Wyandotte, Michigan in 1929, Karres earned a B.F.A. and M.A. in art from Wayne University. A veteran of the US Army, he worked as an illustrator for Ford Motor Company for 25 years, until 1980. He has spent the last 25 years as a full-time fine artist. In 1989, he married Diana. A year later, he opened the Karres Gallery in Royal Oak. As always, he paints in memory of his mother Euridiki  (1904-1987), father John (1894-1986), and his brother George (1927-1994). "I was wise to select them as my family.", Karres says.
 
For the past fifty years, the city of Detroit - its docks and dead-ends, its raucous clubs and colorful characters - has provided the settings and subjects for urban expressionist painter Sam Karres. The pulse of the streets, wild at first, the ebbing, link the two distinct phases of Karres' career as an artist: the bold, bustling, darkly colored oils of his pre-1979 work, and the brighter, quicker, almost evanescent watercolors since then. On one level, Karres' street paintings provide a sort of artistic catalogue of macroscopic social changes in Detroit. Many of his works offer, for example, visual insights into the historically roller-coasting relationship between race and ethnicity over a half-century of urban life. Others capture the impact of Detroit's declining economic fortunes on its buildings and in its neighborhood. In contrast to the fervid, crowded, you-are-there quality of the oil paintings, Karres' later watercolors appear to be composed more quickly and impressionistically, as if the Motor City, in the decades following the 1967 uprising, had lost some of its solidity. The think roiling paint of a city as its peak gives way to the veils of color, the washes, the transparencies of economic decline. His expressionist view of the city as an engine of anxiety is still present, but his use of color is warmer, perhaps even ironically optimistic. "Studio work doesn't excite me," says Mr. Karres. "My dream, even in college, was to paint in the streets." ∗ excerpt from "Sam Karres: Urban Expressionist" by James F. Bloch
206 W. 6th St., Royal Oak, MI 48067
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