Karen Stastny is a painting instructor at the Jewish Community Center of New Orleans and a former instructor for the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. She regularly leads painting workshops in different cities along the gulf coast and sits on the board of KIDsmART. She earned her B.F.A. from the University of New Orleans.New Orleans artist Karen Stastny, who has painted both figuratively and abstractly in the past, chooses to waver somewhere between the two styles with her newest body of work. The main focus of her show is land, and yet the canvases have nothing to do with "landscapes" in the art historical sense. Instead, the artist mindfully evokes the land of our city and our coastline with harmonious color and sweeping gestural brushstrokes. Visual cues for trees and waterscapes recall the feeling of standing amongst branches and leaves or meditating over reflections on the water. With her bright, impressionistic paintings, Stastny successfully manifests a sense of Southern atmosphere and place.