When East Meets West – Interview with Karen Aruba Art

While travelling to beautiful places, Karen loves to illustrate her trip and makes her journey like a fairytale. She sketches travel experiences and pictures with different cultures of each city through visuals and amazing art journal. As a self-taught artist who comes from the East, Hong Kong, Karen draws beautiful sceneries with creative ideas. She has an art brand “Karen Aruba Art” illustrating amazing artwork with products in travel & cultural themes.


Which are the new destinations in Canada that you've chosen for your 'Art Journal Travel'?

In last December, it was my first time to embark on a challenge with an art journey to Japan. Recently this summer in May, I continued the art journey to Vancouver, Whistler and Toronto in Canada with another style of drawing.


How did your art journal inspire (both others and also yourself)?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an art journal shows travel lovers thousands of words of an amazing trip in a glance! An art journal can be added with creative elements, compressed with various scenes into one picture, expressing the travel feeling by using different art tools like pen, watercolor or color pencils, etc. The world will look much more energized and beautiful!


For me, art journal inspires my life. Life is remarkable when new things are discovered every day. As most people know, Hong Kong is a busy city. Everybody works long hours to earn a living and we face strong competition. People are very busy at weekends and they even don’t have room to think about their dreams or what kind of life they are aiming at. I’ m facing the same pressure in life, however, my passion has never squeezed and it motivates me to do something more! I want to appreciate life through the art of observation and inspiration, which will help to do something for the society ultimately - “Drawing is a way to keep myself wandering the future of life”.


Where else would you like to go? How else would you like to make your contents livelier?

There are too many places that I love to travel. My next plan is to illustrate South East Asian cities in a different angle the end of this year. It is always my wish to go back to the One Happy Island - Aruba in the Caribbean Sea. It’s the place where my energy and inspiration of work originated from. Be a creative person! It’s a very long flight indeed but I trust that I will go back someday again.

What kind of medium or art tools would you recommend?

One sketch book, some pencils, watercolor, a camera all get well together in an art journey. I used watercolor and blue pen to recreate photos of lovely places. The colors are soft and gentle which can reflect the peaceful, quiet and relaxing environment.


Which is your newest art piece of the Canadian trip and where will it be featured in Hong Kong? For how long will it be there?

My recent art pieces are just featured in a nice and relaxing café located in Sai Kung, Hong Kong this summer. The café is called “My Sunshine House”. The artwork display also covers other places including Osaka, Kyoto, Europe, Pittsburgh, Hong Kong and Aruba under three main collections of Karen Aruba Art i.e. “Travel with Pen”, “Travel with Pencil” and “Travel with Colors”. I do appreciate that “My Sunshine House” and “Cross-border Culture & Creative Platform” provide such opportunity to me. They are very supportive to local artist. The art exhibition will last until 26 August.


How would you describe your inspiration and influence for your series of paintings and how it came about?"

“Draw life to happiness. Paint life in colors” is the faith of Karen Aruba Art. My motivation all comes from my family and friends who always support me. I would say that I derive inspiration from anything I come across: from nature and sky, to building and architecture, from traditional culture to modern graffiti. I do wish that my artwork and products will continue to inspire people and bring them happiness in lives, which is also the reason why One Happy Island, Aruba exists.


More info:

If you are interested in Karen Aruba’s products, pls visit: www.society6.com/karenaruba


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