Biography

My work is about light: about the conflicts of light and shadow, desolation and beauty, and about the emotional responses light provokes.

—Linda Pearlman Karlsberg

A painter and draughtsman, Linda spent her childhood in a small Massachusetts suburb where she grew to love the natural world all around her. Linda studied visual art at Boston University College for the Arts, with particular mentorship from artist-professors Conger Metcalf, Arthur Polonsky, David Aronson, and Philip Guston. Linda earned both her BFA and MFA magna cum laude at BU. She was awarded a teaching assistantship while an undergraduate and a graduate teaching fellowship in painting as a graduate student. After earning her MFA, Linda continued to teach drawing, design, and painting at Boston University, The Art Institute, and other Boston area colleges. With her husband, photographer Mark Karlsberg, she founded and continues to run Studio Eleven, a professional photographic studio.

Linda has shown her work extensively in group and solo exhibitions in museums, galleries, and universities throughout the United States. The recipient of numerous awards for her drawings and paintings, Linda’s work has been featured in art periodicals, blogs and newspapers, and shared in numerous catalogs. Her work is in public and private collections throughout the United States.

“The play of light is always a catalyst for my portraits, landscapes and still lifes and I am engaged as well by the enigmatic, lyrical, profound and magical I find lurking below these surfaces. My drawings and paintings explore the expressive beauty and infinite richness of the world around us, but also afford an arena in which to probe life’s fragility, struggle, contradictions, and inscrutability. John Ruskin judged the twin purposes of art to be ‘to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.’ I find particular resonance and motivation in this charge.”

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