Karin was born in Cape Town, South Africa. Her love for art started at a young age. She started her journey with pottery at the age of eleven years. Fine Arts and Art History was a major throughout senior school. She enrolled in a BA( LLB) degree, but soon realised that it was not her passion and switched to Art the following year. Her life took a different direction thereafter focusing on capitalistic goals in the corporate -and private sectors as well as entrepreneurial ventures.

Now, in midlife, she has settled in the picturesque rural Swartland, living a quieter lifestyle and focusing on painting and writing. Her painting has changed over the years from still life themes, waterscapes and koi(realism) to abstract figurative portraits. She emphatically states that she will never marginalise or cap her current processes, as part of her nature is to explore, learn and discover. Life is never static and therefore she will embrace change, finding creative ways to adapt.

Classically trained in Fine Arts, she started painting in tempera, egg yolk and distilled water. This is a technique used in iconography. In her oil paintings, her method is the inverse of the technique used in iconography, starting with a watered down application of flooding colour and staining the canvas creating layered colour resulting in rich, exquisite colours and textures. Oil painting allows her to work wet on wet resulting in the spawning of an intuitive colour palette. Every painting is an exploration of application, form and hues until the end of its production and never a result of a standardised process or recipe. The idea is never to create a realistic image. The process is an explorative dissection of the subjects or objects in order to represent it in a different way that still makes sense to the onlooker. ( Very much like a child dissembling objects to explore the parts that makes it whole.)

Vision science of eye movement or saccadic movement and memory processing are explored and presented in her figurative abstract paintings. The camera and its mechanism represents the way the human eye collects data. A camera collects all the data at once, but the human eye collects data by saccadic scanning, examining all the elements in its field of vision, collecting data selectively to form a synoptic image. Similarly Karin’s abstract figurative work represents a faceted map of selective visual observation and saccadic memory. The colour application is mostly a play of juxtaposed hues to infer directional light on the subject and to create a mood. These pieces are merely human images, expressing human qualities.

Her work are influenced by cubism and Sub-Saharan African masks and artefacts found in abundance in and around most touristy areas in and around South-Africa. She has been following Dutch Artist, Peggy Kuipers ( her work displays a distinctive colour palette and simplified human features) and Teil Duncan ( her figurative work displays a juxtaposed play of colour and light mapping postured figures).