Meet the Artist

Karla S. Chambers is a self-taught artist whose work celebrates the color, rhythm, and texture of agricultural landscapes. Born in North Central Oregon and raised in a multigenerational farming family, she has spent her life immersed in fields, crops, and seasons that now appear in her paintings as bold forms and luminous hues.

A woman smiling and sitting in front of a vibrant, colorful abstract painting featuring a rainbow of colors with layered patterns and textures.

Her artistic journey began as she approached becoming an empty nester; seeking a new creative outlet, she picked up brushes and canvas without formal training and quickly developed a distinctive visual language rooted in intuition. Critics and collectors describe her as a Naïve painter, whose work is untutored yet highly sophisticated in its use of color and pattern, conveying both joy and structure.

Alongside her art, Chambers is co-founder of Stahlbush Island Farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, one of the first farms in the United States to receive third-party sustainable certification. The farm became a living palette for her art: she translates the textures of fields, rivers, and crops into stylized compositions that also appear on food packaging and educational materials promoting healthy eating and plant-forward diets.

A woman painting a colorful canvas at an art event. The artwork features a chicken in yellow, black, blue, and orange.
Book titled 'Farming, Food & Fine Art' featuring fruits, vegetables, jars of preserves, and small cups of pudding or yogurt on a table with a colorful cloth. The cover highlights 25 years of food and drink recipes from the author, Karla S. Chambers.
A woman wearing glasses, a red shirt, and an apron, smiling in front of a large painting with red, orange, and black patterns.

Over the past decade, Chambers’ paintings have been exhibited in respected galleries including Arnot Gallery in New York, Gallery 444 in San Francisco, Galerie du Soleil in Naples, and Lara Sydney Gallery in Portland. Her work has also appeared in museum settings such as the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), and the Benton County Historical Society, often in exhibitions that connect farming, food, and fine art.

A smiling woman with glasses, wearing a white shirt, black apron, sitting next to a vibrant floral painting with orange, red, yellow, blue, and purple brushstrokes on a diamond-shaped canvas in an art studio with bookshelves in the background.

Chambers has created more than 300 original paintings and sold over 65% of this body of work to collectors across the United States and abroad. Her imagery has reached wider audiences through product labels, magazine covers, educational projects, and collaborations that use art to encourage conversations about sustainability, nutrition, and the beauty of working lands.

Karla S. Chambers is a self-taught Oregon artist and co-owner of KSC Art, LLC, whose bold, colorful paintings are inspired by a lifetime in agriculture and her work at Stahlbush Island Farms.  She has created more than 300 original works and sold nearly 70% of them, with pieces shown in galleries and museums from New York and San Francisco to Oregon institutions focused on farming, food, and fine art

A blue circular thank you sticker with white decorative berries around the edge, featuring the message: "Thank you! Karla for supporting local artists."

You can find Karla’s art at…

Logo with black laurel wreaths around the text 'The Clothes Tree' inside a dotted circle, with a gradient border from purple to red to yellow.
A sign with the word 'GALLERY' in large blue letters and below it, 'FOUR FORTY FOUR' in smaller blue letters on a white background.

Read about Karla’s involvement with the Art Heals program…

Logo of Oregon Artswatch with green, black, and white design and text stating Oklahoma Artswatch Arts & Culture News.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art logo with black text and red subtitle