KAREN NAIM

KAREN NAIM

Karen Naim, Born in Israel in 1972.
I graduated the ‘Midrasha School of Art and Education’, Israel, in 2003 with excellence.
My inspiration to create is generated by a need to express and create a bridge between my inner and outer world through the use of materials, the need for simple enjoyment, research, playing and connecting between materials, media, ideas and people.
In 2014 I made the major decision to leave the “rat race” for a while and find space and time to dedicate only to my art. With this goal in mind, I flew to Goa, India to fulfil my dream.
In Goa I founded the ‘GoART Open Studio’ which was a delightful gallery and working space I managed for me to create, and for meetings of various media artists from all around the world, to share and inspire one another.
During the stay in Goa I began working intensively on my new creations, including freestyle abstracts, self-portraits, photography of people, animals, nature and objects.

 

Until that time, photography was mostly a tool for me to catch the moment and use it for my paintings. In personal moods or situations, I take photos, which are many times already flirting with painting and drawing media.
Usually, I choose to paint them on paper or canvas. Mostly I start with choosing the image composition, then, I tend to move freely as flexibly as I can between my plan and the work plan. I want to let the creation become what it wants to be, while keeping it within the frame range I had in mind.
When that combination of freedom within a frame appears, I assume my work is going well, and I feel gratitude and satisfaction mixed with fears of ruining it all.
In my present works, contradictory to my previous ones, I chose a limited color scale. This demanded concentration, conscious choices and self-control. Surprisingly with an upside-down logic, it allowed me and my work to experience freedom in my expression.
It also demanded me to be present and change myself all throughout the process: I had to give up my ego and identity, to become an empty space with no personal involvement but paradoxically it gives me a very personal and involved feeling.
In my art, I am interested in the daily life details, wanting to transform them into aesthetic images. These images are likely to change their essence into something totally different.
The old alchemists used to take a low value metals and transform them into gold. For few years I have been studying a method called ‘Holistic Pulsing’, where I got tools to transform my mental and physical challenges and difficulties into development and growth.
In my life and in my art, as portrayed in this series of photographs, I expose here in public for the first time, this magical transformation happens. The ‘main’ issue of these objects, as you can realize, is missing, leaving us with the empty skin full of its new self, standing independently as a whole.
GoART India, was a very successful and fertile creative experience for me and I managed to create many works of art, which I took back to Israel.
I exhibited these paintings and photographs in two self-producted multimedia events, including fine art, music, video, food and Holistic Pulsing.