Silva Karim is an art education professor and a master of arts. Her professional work includes several fields of education; and her creative work is with ceramics, illustration, graphics and, in recent years, painting. She had some individual exhibitions and also took part at some group exhibitions and art colonies. In the field of graphics her favourite technique is rotogravure, especially aquatint and etching. In her illustrations she addresses children's souls with her mature art knowledge. Her creative efforts in the area of clay art prove the author’s confident inter-media transitions and integration of different art types. In her most recent creative period, Silva Karim’s creativity is channelled through painting – with her own personal approach, which again makes it distinctly multimedial. The author combines her already known artistic elements from her previous work and interprets them in such a way that each of them retains its original role and at the same time enters some new interesting symbiotic structures.

Painting surface are robust and structurally full; they are etched with clear and distinct lines that lacerate pure substantiallity and determine its contents. Every line has its purpose: it is a note, a description, a symbol or a metaphor, accompanied by stylised elements of reality, reduced to the essentials - subjectively articulated signs. One of the frequently used elements is a bird – the one narrative element that the author likes best when strolling through her landscapes. In every flight she discovers new symbolic dimensions, intertwined with personal or general meanings.

However, all colour values cannot stay merely part of the variegated superficial happening. They are disappearing underground, leaving their plain meaning to confirm the message within.

The author travels from surface into depth, whereas the beholder is given the chance of visual travelling across the painting, from the ground up to the sky. These are the two extremes searching for the common bond, and so the story evolves further in its meaningful communication.

The painting of Silva Karim arises out of continuous analytical research and creative confrontation of various artistic disciplines, perfected with her own aesthetic findings - enables her confident functioning in different spheres of artistic activity, as well as in one only, synthesizing individual creative elements.

Silva Karim lives and creates in Ajdovscina, Slovenia.

Anamarija Stibilj Šajn

art historian and art critic