We capture the personality, spirit and likeness that make your beloved animal special. Our fine art experience informs our pet portrait painting, and we take great delight melding that experience with our love of animals. With an Adorable Pet Portrait you can celebrate your pet with a unique, creative representation; honor and remember a pet that’s passed on; or offer a unique and precious gift to a relative or friend.
Karen is an established fine art painter with more years of experience than Paco, her brown tabby, has claws. With a childhood spent on the family farm on the Central California coast, Karen developed a deep love and appreciation for all kinds of animals, big and small, furry and feathered---and scaled!. She received her B.A. in art at Stanford University and studied at Kofukai Art Institute in Tokyo, did graduate work at UC Santa Barbara, then settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea for its beauty and inspiration. She married Rick, and continued to pursue her career exhibiting her art in galleries and museums in the U.S. and Europe, teaching college and adult education art courses, conducting workshops, receiving grants and art residencies throughout California. Karen’s unique color sense infuses her work with energy and brilliance, and she often incorporates visual elements of her Japanese heritage into her paintings. She brings these qualities to pet portraits to give form to the personalities of each pet she depicts. Karen balances a natural elegance of line and composition with a keen sense of fun and inventiveness. Her love of nature reveals itself in the patterns of leaves, flowers and plant life that often emerge in her backgrounds.
Rick brings to Adorable Pet Portraits a love of animals and years of fine art painting experience. Rick’s growing up was as peripatetic as Karen’s was rooted. With both dogs and cats at his side and horses in his heart, he created his own fixed ground and earned an M.A. in painting and an M.A. in art history at California State University Chico. His professional experience includes positions as museum director and museum curator. He wrote weekly art columns for the Monterey Herald, and other local and national publications. He has written texts for exhibition catalogs, artists‘ monographs and gallery brochures. As an artist, he has exhibited in galleries and museums, and taught college and high school art and writing. In his spare time he pondered the meaning of life. His pet portraits of dogs, cats, horses, and birds express a painterly manner inspired by his favorite artist, Corot, as well as a host of other French modernists. His marriage to Karen introduced him to Japanese art and culture. He now includes Hiroshige among his influences and resolves to learn Japanese once he’s figured out the life meaning questions.
Karen and Rick moved from the Monterey Peninsula to Napa several years ago for the inspiration of the natural beauty of Northern California, to be near San Francisco and to raise Kenji, their ten year-old son.