Kara Knutson is a painter of quiet emotional worlds.

Working in oil, she explores the tension between beauty and disappearance- each piece a meditation on longing, memory, and the unseen shape of emotion. Her work leans in to romantic realism with a contemporary undercurrent, creating paintings that feel like dreams half-remembered, often using floral forms, figures, and softened edges to speak to what slips away. Her current work is rooted in the exploration of figures hidden within a botanica dreamscape as a way to speak the unspeakable- inviting viewers to see not just with their eyes, but with their memory. She is deeply drawn to moments of quiet rupture: the near-beautiful, the nearly vanished and the tension that lies deeply in being human.

Kara lives and works in Milwaukee, WI, USA.