Featured image: Sisters, Karen Lacey, 2020, oil on birch panel, 45 x 23 in. / 114.3 x 88.9 cm.
Karen Lacey captures the early light with reverence and restraint.
Karen Lacey paints luminous, early-morning landscapes of New York’s Finger Lakes, blending realism with expression to capture fleeting natural light.
Her oil paintings, rooted in the Finger Lakes region of New York, are quiet hymns to changing skies and silhouetted trees. Whether rendered in loose gestural marks or detailed realism, each work traces the slow unfolding of morning, moments often missed, yet full of emotional clarity. Through Spring Sunrise Starkey FLX1, Seneca Spring Sunrise FLX3, and April 2019 Sunrise, Lacey offers three visual meditations on atmosphere, transition, and the personal significance of place.
Explore our curated selection of contemporary artists from around the globe.
Naturalist Gallery offers artist representation internationally. Apply your art.
In Spring Sunrise Starkey FLX1, a solitary tree frames the scene like a sentinel of spring. The sun, suspended low in the sky, glows softly through a veil of clouds, casting warm light on the rich greens below. The detailed rendering of trees in the foreground gives way to a moody, expressive sky, a tension between stillness and movement. Lacey's composition leads the viewer from the earth into the clouds, as if pulling memory from the soil upward into dream. The tree’s bare branches echo the season’s edge, spring arriving, but winter not yet fully gone.
Seneca Spring Sunrise FLX3, Karen Lacey, 2025, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in. / 60.96 x 45.72 cm.
Seneca Spring Sunrise FLX3 is a lakeside love letter. With gentle reflection and painterly grace, Lacey portrays Seneca Lake in its early May glory. The tree in the foreground bends subtly toward the water, mirroring the curvature of the clouds and shoreline. Soft lavender, amber, and rose hues fill the sky and its mirrored surface, while the background hills fade into layered mist. The painting hums with quiet, a contemplative pause before the world fully wakes. The precise control of color temperature and value makes the piece feel like a held breath at dawn.
April 2019 Sunrise, Karen Lacey, 2019, oil on birch panel, 24 x 36 in. / 60.96 x 91.44 cm.
With April 2019 Sunrise, Lacey steps into a more gestural, expressive mode. Here, the trees become painterly silhouettes, their vertical rhythms contrasting the warm, energetic brushstrokes of sunrise light. Unlike the first two pieces, which rely on soft gradients and realism, this work buzzes with abstraction and emotional immediacy. Lavender, magenta, and gold streak through the forest canopy, and the viewer is placed within the treeline, experiencing the sky through the filter of memory. It’s a looser, more instinctive work, but one that holds just as much gravity.
Karen Lacey’s sunrises are not just depictions of light, they are stories told through shifting color and compositional grace. Whether peering through bare trees, reflecting on lakewater, or glowing behind shadowed forests, her work captures fleeting moments with an enduring emotional weight. These paintings remind us that dawn is both an ending and a beginning, a space between, and in that threshold, we find clarity.
Learn more About Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art.
Spring Sunrise PY FLX2, Karen Lacey, 2023, mixed media, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.
You may also find the following articles helpful:
The 14 Essential Artists of Impressionism
Expressionism: 20 Iconic Paintings & Their Artists
Renaissance Art: Origins, Influences, and Key Figures
Classical Art Movement: Exploring the History, Artists, and Artworks
Figurative Art: Understanding, Collecting, and Appreciating the Style
Daily Routines of Famous Artists: Learn from the Masters
Top 12 Controversial Artworks That Changed Art History