When I first noticed Atlanta based artist Karin Jurick, it was from her early participation in the “painting a day” discipline back in early 2006, a then still-young practice among perhaps a dozen or so serious painter/bloggers.

I then wrote a dedicated article about her work, noting my admiration for her direct, painterly approach, and a particular fondness for her series of paintings of museum goers in front of various works.

Recently, I’ve posted about her side project of hosting a group painting blog, Different Strokes From Different Folks (also here and here), in which she periodically provides a painting challenge for numerous artists who paint the same photographic subject, and can then compare their work with the approach of others who take on the same subject.

In the time since I first wrote about her work, her own painting practice has evolved, as she has reaped the rewards of frequent painting, refining her approach and becoming more confident in her command of color, value and edges.

She has also shifted her focus away from small daily paintings somewhat as she becomes more in demand as a gallery painter and devotes more time to preparing for gallery shows.

A new show featuring her work has just opened tonight (I’m remiss in not getting this post up soon enough to make more people aware of the opening) at the Morris & Whiteside Galleries in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It is a three person show that Jurick shares with California Painter Ken Auster (who I recently profiled) and sculptor Jane Decker.

The opportunity to have her work in a show with Auster was particularly pleasing to Jurick, who cites Auster an influence before she even started painting, inspiring her to strive for that loose, impressionistic feeling that is the foundation of her approach.

As is evident from the works she has prepared for the show, Jurick has found a depth of interest in her continuing series of paintings of museum patrons viewing art, a subject that also allows her to do brief notational versions of great paintings, like Carravagio’s Supper at Emmaus, which was recently on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago from the National Gallery in London (image above, top), as well as paintings from the Art Institute’s own collection like Franz Kline’s Painting (second down) and one of the Art Institute’s most popular works, Paris Street, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte.

Her other series for this show concentrates on beach scenes, in which she also observes those who are oblivious to being observed and lets the sea and sky serve as the “artworks” that capture their attention.

Jurick has not only refined her painting technique over the years, but also her compositions, which have become more strongly geometric and graphically bold, while still retaining a warmth and sense of place (even in gallery scenes in which the observed work is less than warm).

In preparation for this show, she found it necessary to beg off from providing a subject for the Different Strokes blog for a while, urging participants to find their own subjects in the interim; only to be surprised some weeks later to find that they (119 of them) had organized and chosen to all do portraits of her as a thank you for the inspiration she has been providing for them (unfortunately the Picassa Gallery of those paintings is not available at the moment).

Jurick’s web site has a selection of available works, current works that are “Still Wet”, sketches and studies, videos, mentions of her work in various art publications and an archive of past works in which you can see her past paintings in a variety of genres.

On her blog, A Painting Today, you’ll find her small paintings, which you can still sometimes bid on through her store on eBay, and posts about her larger paintings, sometimes with detail crops (as in the details at bottom, above from the two paintings above them) and discussion of technique.

Painter Jeffrey Hayes, who I’ve written about before, featured Jurick as one of his Guest Artists, along with a short interview.

Jurick remains a favorite, whose work I follow often, and though I miss some of the older subjects that she has moved away from, like her warmly lit room interiors, I look forward to wherever her constant study and continual painting practice take her.