On the Use of Internal Images / Visiting Karin Camara’s Studio in Lapitz
Detlef Stapf

Lapitz.  Whoever peers over the shoulder of Lapitz (Müritz) resident Karin Camara while she is drawing the Mecklenburg landscape will notice her ability to capture the essential.  She’s quickly placed the few lines upon the board that outline the picture, which then reveals itself straight away – but only to the trained eye.  The 36-year-old never attended university.  Neither in her learned trade (construction), nor in her planned study of architecture did she foresee a satisfactory career.

Since the mid nineties she has used her talent to establish her own artistic existence – and with success.  In 1996, the self-trained artist gained membership into the Association of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Artists.  Soon thereafter, she became a member of the board of directors.

Everything that the artist has appropriated in terms of solid technical skill was acquired through “images of an inner harmony with the world.”  For others, creativity might evolve most quickly within a process of egocentric isolation, but Karin Camara acquires her impulses via openness to other people.  The “inner images” also pervade the monothematic iconography of her work, an example being when the shape of a boat also serves to represent a jar or container, a bird’s wing, a tightened bow or metaphors for traveling.  In this way, Camara imagines herself approaching the syncretic origins of art.  This notion became abundantly clear in 2003, when she spent time in Africa .  In the capital of Guinea , Conakry , the native of Neubrandenburg married her African husband, whom she had met in Berlin .  The earthy colors as well as the simple and reduced shapes, the glimmering and piercing light of the continent, the bared souls of the people provided her with a reservoir of stimulation, from which she continues to create today and from which a self-contained series of pieces has emerged.

As a member of a worldwide internet association of abstract painters known as pintura fresca, the Mecklenburg resident has opened herself to a new area: informal painting.  Members of this association cultivate a common understanding of art and support one another in the search for exhibition spaces and buyers.  Camara herself is currently working on lacquer pictures (upon large metal boards) of colored structures that hint at calligraphy. They have been well-received by a gallery curator in Singapore .

Camara comprehends art for herself foremost as an intuitive insight into self and the world.  For her artistic statement, she turns to the words of the bestselling Brazilian author and “alchemist of words” Paulo Coelho, who intimates, “…”  According to Camara, this quotation is not only innovatively formulated, but also describes a learnable (and thus teachable) approach to method.