Fans help artist keep on creating
Crowdfunder after shock eyesight diagnosis
An artist who was becoming fearful of losing her precious eyesight has raised enough money to purchase a special large-scale painting easel.
Last month Karenina Johnson successfully ran a crowdfunding appeal to buy a specialist easel that is only available in America.
It will enable her to continue painting after being diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition.
Karenina, an invited member of Perthshire Artisans, is also a member of Perthshire Open Studios and exhibited as one of their ‘artists in residence’ at the main showcase exhibition in The Bield in 2019.
Her paintings are in private collections in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and Singapore.
Since moving to Perth three years ago, Karenina has become a wellknown art teacher, taking on adults with varying levels of experience, from complete beginners to more experienced students.
Before the pandemic restrictions made it impossible, she was giving regular art classes at the County Hotel in Perth city centre.
But faced with a shock diagnosis last year, Karenina began to consider what she could do to try and shore up her eyesight.
So, during lockdown, she made careful preparations to ask for public support to buy new equipment aimed to keep her creativity going without straining her eyes and hastening any deterioration.
In her crowdfunder proposal she told supporters: “I love painting and I want to continue working for many years to come but, sadly, there is now an obstacle to that.
“I was recently diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition, which may end up with me requiring corneal implants.
“To mitigate the need for these implants, I must change my current working style and work on much larger and looser paintings.
“I need to raise £3500 for a special easel so I may continue to do the work I love.
“The easel will make a massive difference to how I work. I will be able to work on really large paintings but allow me the flexibility to work on a smaller scale if I want to,” she explained.
The easel - which was adapted for a normal room with a lower ceiling and had cantilevered ‘fingertip’ control to raise it up - costs £2300 added to which was a transportation cost of £675. There were also fees associated with Crowdfunder and Creative Scotland which equated to £525.
To incentivise people to help, Karenina offered a range of rewards, ranging in price from £10 to £125.
Rewards included one-to-one lessons via Zoom and at the top end of the scale, a summer painting day for up to six people in a Perth park with fine picnic lunch provided.
In exchange for mid-range contributions, she offered original acrylic paintings begun as demos for her art classes.
“Recently I went through the extensive stack of demo works and took the time to complete some of my favourite pieces,” she told the PA.
“These pictures are individually priced, not available anywhere else.”
The response to the ‘New easel and eye’ crowdfunder appeal went better than Karenina had hoped, resulting in her raising £5214 -nearly double what she had hoped to bring in.
Karenina was delighted that Creative Scotland agreed to make her project one of only 20 across the country that it would match, making her final total much higher.
The extra money enabled her to upgrade her computer equipment.
“The extra money means that I can replace my laptop with a desktop and that will make seeing the computer screen and editing videos a whole lot easier,” she explained. “My old MacBook Air was so old, the keyboard letters had worn off.
“So between my easel and my desktop, my life will be transformed.
“There is an awful lot of work preparing for a crowdfunder and I want to give thanks to everyone who lent a hand. I had a lot of help from Anna, my coach at Crowdfunder. com, as well as my friend Ingrid who did all the proofreading.
“Caron Ironside Perthshire Artisans very kindly prepared some social media posts and Allen, my partner, was a great help.
“I also had some really generous pledges so I was very lucky.
“Early on, a mystery pledger, who I later found out was a customer I’d never actually met, offered £1000. I was really blown away by that.”