Madison artist Karen Laudon refers to her paintings as visual poems. Lately, the poems are about her garden.

“Paintings that I have been working on recently have been a little more directly related to work in my gardens and some of those forms,” Laudon said during a visit to her home studio earlier this week. “It’s not all visual. Some of it is the mental aspect if working with rock and in the dirt. And so on. So I feel like it all comes together in an alchemical way. I work on my paintings for usually a long time. Sometimes over a period of years. I’ll work on many at the same time.

“I work on the floor a lot. Especially as I started doing more pouring and painting that way.”

The artist, who has been working with oil paints for over 40 years, is an exhibiting artist as part of Carnelian Art Gallery’s show, “Dreams In the Undergrowth,” which is a two-month-long commentary on mental health, the subconscious and nature. The exhibition will be up until the end of June, and you can find Laudon’s pieces closer to the back of the gallery’s showroom.

“At this point, I don’t measure things,” Laudon said. “I have a sense of it and different pigments require less or more oil mediums. I have taken to just kind of letting it do its thing to a degree and then reacting to it. My tendency is to want control. I think its much more interesting to give up control and then to work with it. I’ve been … on a lot of these pieces I tend to go back and forth between opaque and transparent washes. Sometimes it builds up and sometimes I don’t wait until the paint underneath is dry. I’ve been able to create really stable surfaces.

“This painting, if you look at it closely, has a lot of that build up and back and forth. The whole process is really important. To me, it reflects some of the natural processes in nature.”

Laudon grew up in Milwaukee, her childhood divided between a lake cabin and her grandparents’ dairy farm. She recalled that her grandmother would take her foraging in the woods, which seeded her current artistic passions.

After studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Laudon completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees in drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute. She lived in San Francisco for 16 full years exhibiting, living, and working, returning to Madison to raise her two daughters while pursuing art full-time.

“I think its wonderful that we finally have a gallery downtown,” said Laudon of showing at Carnelian Art Gallery.

But “its really perplexing to me why Madison has such a hard time sustaining commercial galleries.”

We are here to change that.