Karen Tucker Kuykendall is a painter who was born in Tampa, Florida and continues to live and work there.
In a personal statement about why she became an artist, she says, “I always wanted to be an artist. Well, I really always wanted to be a professional baseball player…but that wasn’t going to work for a number of reasons. But really I always, as long as I can remember, wanted to be an artist. I have always loved to draw and paint and create things out of stuff. But mostly, I have always liked to look at things…study what things looked like…how the shapes and colors and textures of things really looked and how they changed and how they played with my mind and my memory and my feelings. Making things was good, because I have never been a sit still and do nothing kind of person. In school when we took those tests that told you what you should be when you grew up it always came out that I should be an artist of some kind. I also, at different times, wanted to be a meteorologist and a marine biologist. I still love weather maps and fishing. But artist is what I became.”
Karen received an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Hillsborough County in 2017.
