My Life has been a journey of exploration identifying and experiencing the energies that are present in and around us. Painting art and meditation have been my tools for becoming aware and expressing energies of others and myself. I experience life as a spectrum of energy from essence through to the visible and tangible world of things, people, and culture as a painter.
I allow my creative side to have free rein to express this life energy as I am living it in the moments, whether I paint forms or non-objective abstraction is a matter left to my creative impulse. If I am painting outdoors in nature, I will likely paint the landscape, but I will also be expressing how I feel in that landscape. This way, both the outer forms I see, and my awareness of my inner experience of feelings and intuitions influence the painting. When I work in my studio, I usually start from nothing in mind, which allows me to enter the present moment from the place of infinite potential. I allow the painting to reveal itself, as I am swept along in the creative flow; this way I am able to experience life energy.
My approach to painting has been shaped by my experience of twenty-nine years with art. Every situation I encounter is affected by the awareness I choose to bring to it for example, the thought that might arise in me that I want the painting to look exciting and desirable. Such a thought would be a distraction from the direct experience of painting and would diminish the expression. I let go of the thoughts and allow the creative flow to guide me. As I look at the outer world, I see what appears to be a solid reality. In my body I connect what I see back to essence via my feelings and make the shift from something very dense to something very energetic and alive. Inside I tap into energetic being and make the conversion between the relative world and the absolute; I bridge the gap and paint.
Karem Aneed was born in Baghdad in 1963. He studied Fine Art at the University of Baghdad and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1989. Karem began exhibiting in his home country of Iraq and beyond in 1982 and received several distinguished awards for his work. In 2001, Karen left his home country and arrived to his hew homeland in Canada. He now lives and continues to paint in Hamilton, ON.