Artist Karissa Ho’s work with watercolors compellingly explores the interplay of color and form. Her vibrant brushwork evokes both warm solar vignettes and intense seascapes. Influenced by the ever-changing sky and her favorite literary works, her paintings echo the sentiment expressed by poet Ada Limon: “Even / color was not color, but a mood.” 

How long have you been painting? What about this medium appeals to you?

A cheerful Russian woman taught me to use oil paints when I was in elementary school. Her classes took place at the Palms Recreation Center in Los Angeles; the lighting inside was incredibly fluorescent and it always smelled vaguely chemical. We focused on recreating, with as much accuracy as possible, generic images of trees and lakes from pages torn out of outdated wall calendars. I still mostly paint landscapes, but almost exclusively with watercolors — they’re forgiving, portable, and have real capacity. They can be opaque and gunky or totally sheer, just a whisper. And if I mess up, I just wash it out and start again. Upon reflection I feel I had no particular talent with the oil medium, but learning it helped train the painterly intuition I have now for what should go where, and when, and why. 

Would you walk us through your process?

I’m very serial. I like to work in series, I like to sit down and paint ten small pieces in one go. And I like to work quickly — this way I can see a theme evolve in real time. It’s so interesting to consider the different versions of a painting, the other paintings it might have been. I’m constantly trying to version things. Versioning is really the only method that gets me to a flow state, and it reinforces a creative practice wherein I’m not at the whim of a flighty muse, but can rather sit down and paint at any point. And then, if I get it right, the painting seems to paint itself. The resulting work is intellectually consistent, as in, the thinking behind the work is consistent. At the very least, the serial form helps capture, even if just for myself, what life felt like at the specific, immediate moment of painting. 

I understand you have a series of watercolors influenced by Ada Limon’s poem, “The Endlessness.” What else would you say inspires your work?

Literary work often leaks into my creative work. Once, I did thirty small paintings inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I based a yearlong design project off of Joan Didion’s work in 2022. I’ll likely complete some creative thing for my Russian literature course this semester. But modernist, postmodernist, and abstract expressionist American women artists — Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Corita Kent, and more — have also hugely impacted my style. Otherwise, in no particular order, I adore the late, great Matthew Wong’s landscapes, Munch’s woodcuts, Cezanne’s paintings (but only the ones that look “incomplete”), and Magritte’s neighborhood scenes. Finally, I am in love with and forever inspired by the horizon line, and the way light looks in the sky at every hour of the day, and the view from the car window when I’m driving between Northern California and Southern California. 

You’ve mentioned that some of your geometric pieces have “helped [you] explore emotive form, color, and negative space.” Do you associate specific forms and colors with particular emotions and ideas?

The geometric pieces are from a very particular point in time, my freshman year of college: young adult life was of course unclear to me in 2021; I had moved away from home; I was trying to figure out what I was and what I wanted. So as a series they can be read as an attempt to get my feelings under control and in order. To practice with shapes and colors was joyful — and to exercise my spatial reasoning and hand stability was practical — but painting in this way was mostly a coping mechanism. I haven’t felt the need to go back to it since, and I don’t know if I want to. 

What are your plans for the future? Is there anything else you’d like to share about your work?

When my final examinations are over, I plan to sleep for a day straight, then pack. I’ve been on the East Coast for about half the year, so I look forward to going home to LA and seeing my family and the dog. I have a painting being published soon at Flash Frog (a fantastic online literary magazine). There are always too many project ideas sloshing around in my head, but maybe one will make it onto paper before the year ends. 

Karissa Ho is a writer and artist from Los Angeles. Her poems and paintings can be found in JMWW, Red Ogre Review, Radar Poetry, The Good Life Review, The Texas Review, Sundog Lit, and more. She studies English literature and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is a very fast walker.