On a casino floor, where voices traveled by radio, Karen Kristin held a laser lighter in one hand and a microphone in the other.
“I would point at the same time I was talking and direct them to get it just right,” Kristin said, describing the setup for an art installation painted at a Las Vegas casino.
The initial job involved creating a sunset on a 12,000‑square‑foot ceiling.
The team was hired back and the project eventually expanded into a sweeping work that carried Kristin’s painted sky through the casino’s hallways, theaters and restaurants, totaling some 200,000 square feet.
Kristin is an artist who has lived locally for 25 years. Her home and studio are surrounded by hundreds of her pieces, from watercolors and a series built around wolves, coyotes and mountain lion motifs to early California seascapes and portraits, as well as works from a long career painting sky on commission.
This year, Kristin donated her first work to the city of Cortez. “The Red Sunset,” her largest canvas work to date, now hangs in the municipal courtroom. The piece was painted in Albuquerque in 1992, commissioned for a photographer who wanted a backdrop for a commercial.
For casino projects, she served on the ground as art director while painters in the lift cages moved across the ceiling. “There were four of us. Three painters. Me, my friend, and her husband were the three painters,” Kristin said. “I was mostly the director from the floor and then I was a finisher too.”
It was grueling work, taking more than 10 hours a day, work that’s left a mark on her body. “So, this is my posture,” she said Thursday, smiling and giving a subtle shrug at her Cortez home on Indian Camp Ranch.
“But I see a chiropractor every two weeks regularly and so far I'm doing fine,” she said.
Kristin said the choice to donate came from a moment of change that’s partly practical and partly existential, the kind she said she’s arrived at since her business Sky Art started to slow.
“I sold the studio in September, and it was really a business decision,” she said after decades of owning the studio and gallery at 125 N. Sligo St. “I had a hundred paintings hanging … They're all here now.”
Sky Art took her around the world and also to Vegas, where she painted in various shops and casinos, including at the Venetian Macao Resort and Hotel, Sunset Station Hotel and Casino and the iconic blue sky at Forum Shops at Caesars Palace.
Asked whether she liked the combination of business and art, she didn’t hesitate.
“I did,” Kristin said. “I loved it.”
Kristin said she is considering donating more works, first to her relatives and daughters. The city honored the donation in a special message at the City Council meeting Monday, where members thanked her for the 7‑by‑11‑foot painting.
“I'm just getting started donating … I will never retire. It’s not my way,” Kristin said. “But we are needing, we are old now, and we are needing to simplify while we can.”
Her early memories are of reaching her toddler fingers out of the crib bars to draw on the wall, a habit her mother, who was also an artist, never scolded.
She bought the 35‑acre ranch property in 1998, but first traveled and lived many places.
Kristin has always supported herself through art, making her living selling paintings or trying out different business ideas. She went to India in 2000 to create murals for Swami Sai Baba, a famous religious teacher now deceased, painting large elemental panels with water, fire and wind. She did the portrait of Sai Baba. In her Denver studio, she painted the panels for a museum, traveled on‑site in India and finished the touch‑ups there.
In her scrapbook, there’s a photo of young Kristin smiling before the Taj Mahal.
She worked for a decade as an illustrator for a Chinese master, painted furniture with a friend in New Mexico, traded artwork, built a studio and remodeled spaces.
Kristin and her team were finishing a major sky‑ceiling project for a Korean Japanese billionaire at his estate when the COVID‑19 pandemic hit. The whole dilemma of the pandemic contributed to a slowdown in large‑scale commissions.
“I've always liked symbolism,” she said, pointing out a series of work where animals move from realism into older beings.
“The idea is the animal starts out realistically and then gradually becomes the totem,” she said. “And same thing, the realistic animal gradually becomes the totem as the people here begin to recognize the qualities they have.”
Even one of her darker paintings carries symbols: dark brown shadows, black and violet colors represent a dark energy, and the tortured face of a wolf shows flickers of the soul taking flight. The painting is of Taos Mountain, where in Taos, New Mexico, she lived for years. Kristin describes sounds from the canyon “like the groans of the earth itself.”
“So, this painting is called ‘Splitting Up.’ Because it's a crack, it's not an erosion caused by a river,” she said. “It was made from a splitting in the earth. The wolf part is the dark energy and these canyon walls … I do have this painting somewhere … it is a dark one.”
