Silent Voices, Inner Landscapes: The Creative Process of Carmush

The source of Carmush’s work lies deep within her inner voices—silent voices teeming with life beneath the surface. These are not words, but sensations, images, movements—a whole world seeking to be born, to take shape, and to find a place in reality. The path to this world passes through canvas and paper, with black ink as the primary medium. From this ink, countless shades of gray emerge, each carrying depth, emotion, and meaning.

An Intuitive, Free, and Unconscious Process

The creative process begins with the canvas laid out on the floor. Carmush approaches it with free movements, sometimes using various tools, sometimes with her bare hands. In the initial stage, there is something automatic, almost unconscious—a floating image from an undefined realm, captured and anchored onto the canvas. This is a moment of freedom, where creation emerges from the gut, from instinct, from a primal urge.

Afterward comes a stage of distance. Carmush pauses, steps back from the canvas, and allows it to “breathe” and express its own needs. The canvas becomes a home for the image, a whole world in which it dwells. At this point, the artist observes, examines the needs of the creation, paints its immediate surroundings, the peripheral space, and conducts a nonverbal dialogue with what has come into being.

Questions of Artistic Language

Simultaneously, questions relating to the language of art always arise: stain, line, color, composition. These questions accompany every stage of the process, but the answers must serve the newly created being on the canvas. The balance between intuition and rules, between freedom and structure, is at the heart of Carmush’s creative journey.

Biomorphic Worlds, Exploration of Creation and Change

The central themes in Carmush’s work draw inspiration from the biomorphic world—organic shapes, emerging creatures, links, and connections. She seeks a system of rules that will withstand the test of every living creation: What does a living being need to exist? What conditions allow it to continue changing, to be reborn, to disappear and return?

Her main subjects are creation, transformation, edges or their absence, links, and connections. All these stem from her awe of nature—every shape, every movement, every detail is derived from the world outside the studio, but undergoes a profound internal transformation.

Inner Landscape, Landscapes of the Soul

Carmush defines herself as a “studio artist.” The studio is the space where the magic happens—a gaze inward, into the soul, not outward into the open. Even when she sketches a landscape in nature, in the subsequent work in the studio, that landscape undergoes a transformation—it becomes infused with her inner voice, gains new meaning, and turns into a psychological landscape, as Aviva Uri described: “an inner landscape.”

Beings Between Body and Spirit

The beings born on Carmush’s canvas are corporeal, very physical, but their main occupation is with the spirit—with mental states, sensations, and existential questions. They are never complete, always in a process of becoming, open to infinite change and transformation. Carmush seeks to paint what is absent—the spaces, the wonder, what is absorbed and disappears, what the skin radiates, and what the mouth does not say.

Striving Toward the Unknown

Ultimately, Carmush’s creative process is a constant journey into the unknown. She seeks to paint the question, the doubt, the lack. Each work is a new investigation, an attempt to give form to the formless, a voice to the voiceless. This is art that invites the viewer to pause, to observe, and to dare to ask—what are we really seeing? And perhaps, what are we not seeing?