KARIN KUHLMANN
[Digital Art - the independence of choosing artistic means]
'Blinding' by Bacchus Barua

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As a commercial artist I earned my living for more than 25 years with traditional means of creation. Any kind of designing, painting and illustrating has been all the time part of my job. But my creativity was strictly restricted by the respective product and the particular demands of customers and consumers. 1994 the computer has made its arrival into my life and I discovered very soon the inexhaustible and inspiring creative potential of this new artistic tool. 1996 I began seriously to work with the computer, experimented with several graphic software programs and enjoyed now to realize my own ideas and visions...the beginning of a never ending process of learning.

The manipulating and reworking of my photos, the building and postprocessing of 3D-sceneries has been for a long time of great interest for me. It has never been my aim to create realistic reflections of my surrounding environment. I would rather like to show the things between and behind and to make my thoughts and perceptions visible. My works are frequently very strong related with personal and social conditions, experiences and emotions. e.g. "Body & Soul" (1997) tells about the power given to all of us - the power of selfhealing and the power of taking responsibility, waiting of beeing activated. For me it is comparable with a painful but also very powerful process of birth. I used photographed and digitally manipulated tree structures, completed with paintings, to realize this image.

Since the beginning of working on digital art I've always been particularly fond on generating fractals. Fractals are always the solution of a complex mathematical problem - but viewed in isolation of mathematical questions and contents they are graphic patterns as a snapshot of the infinity with the spiral as a symbol. If you have a closer look on it you will detect fractals as a mean of creation in many of my photopaintings (e.g. "A star is born" (1998), "Magicpath" (1998) and "Purgatory" (2001)), because they are wonderful suitable to enhance the picture expression and to underline and include parts of the image.

2000 I've found my very personal way of expression. I've never had the tendency to work abstract but my fondness for fractals has got a new dimension since I began to work with FraxFlames. Flames are a kind of fractals but have the quality of natural paintings like crayons and watercolours. Like some early surrealists and abstractionists I draw my inspiration from the technique. For that reason I prefer to utilize "Automatism" for my creative processes in order to release my inner pictures. I usually generate a series of inspiring and associative organic shapes on transpararent layers, rework and combine it to form subtle arrangements of glowing transparent areas of colours, creating its own dramaturgy by including the light behind it. Drawing by algorithm depends widely on coincidence. However the generating and selecting of dynamic organic forms, their editing and colouring, is based on what psychologists refer to as "subjective perception".

During the last 3 years I worked mainly on two series. The first one "Faith, Love and Despair" resulted against the backdrop of the extremly illnes of my husband Karl-Ludwig Kuhlmann, who diseased in April 2002 with lunge cancer. I accompanied him through six chemotherapies and we shared every moment until he died on June 12nd 2003. During this time it was very important for me to find an outlet through works like "Presentiments", "Burning Patience", "Space Demand", "Headless", "Attempt to Escape", "Balance of Power"...only to mention a few of it.

The second is a series of poetic lyrically contemplations, a kind of trip into myself , reflecting thoughts, feelings and perceptions. Mathematical art is - although it seems to be a contradiction in terms - a very intuitive and individual kind of work.