Exploring the natural world, Anna Camner's work evokes feelings of being swathed by deep waters and rustling leaves
Anna Camner’s painting evoke the sensation of diving deep into the cool water of Stockholm’s Archipelago in late July. You know there are no sharks, no deadly creatures waiting for you. Still, you can’t help feeling a certain thrill and a slight tinge of fear before jumping in.
An incredibly skilled painter, Camner’s work combines the organic – fungi, perhaps – with more abstract materials, plastic-like, painted so delicately they look like sheets of silk. Her work is reflected in her personality. She is soft-spoken, but precise, appearing to glide across the room.
Her childhood was often spent in solitude. “I never went to kindergarten and didn’t know many children,” she says. “I was shy and scared of everything but enjoyed spending time alone in the little forest by our house.” Still, she describes her upbringing, in Nacka, outside of Stockholm, as “happy.” “After I graduated, I went to art school and was stuck,” she laments. “I regret becoming an artist every sleepless night I endure, but when I come back to the studio again in the morning it’s all somehow totally worth it.”
Anna Camner at work.
Camner has several wells of inspiration to drink from, citing her artistic inspirations as “Marilyn Minter, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, John Currin, and Jenny Saville, and even Hieronymos Bosch," before adding, “and most of the old Dutch Masters.” Besides art, she finds solace in music. “I like the directness of music and how it emphasises emotions and impulses and adds energy,” she says. She believes that the medium of painting is basic, which is why it’s been explored and practiced for tens of thousands of years. Painting essentially allows the artist the “complete freedom of expression.” “It comes so naturally to paint. Paintings and music are the only art forms that have the capacity to blow my mind and make me reach an almost ego-dissolution kind of state,” she says.
She returns to certain materials in her work – “fat and plastic, especially when they hang in the balance between natural and artificial.” To Camner, the fat is “organic, beautiful and a necessary component in many living things but at the same time it has a low status, that is an interesting contrast to play with.” Another material the artist is obsessed with is plastic. “It comes in all imaginable colours and sensations, it is soft and hard, hated and loved, safe and poisonous, always all around us, it almost seems integrated with our bodies,” she says.
Camner only makes seven-to-ten paintings a year, each of which is incredibly detail-oriented. “I can get caught up in creating repetitive patterns for weeks at a time,” she says. “It makes me feel like I can reach outside of the bell jar. I try not to question why I get interested in certain topics, and let my subconscious decide what is meaningful to paint.”
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The artist’s upcoming exhibition, 'The Naked Dive', opened at Stockholm’s Wetterling Gallery in March. While finalising the details for the exhibition, her first solo show at the gallery, Camner has been working on an accompanying book, which will be released later in April. I press her on what her new work is about. “Many of the paintings in the exhibition are a melting substance pouring out from pipes,” she says. “It could be something artificial, industrial, or an organic material…I leave that for the viewer to decide.” The title of the show refers to the artist’s idea of “giving myself to the dark depths. It describes the feeling I have every time I start a new painting.”
Anna Camner’s exhibition, The Naked Dive, at Wetterling Gallery, Kungsträdgården 3, Stockholm, is on from the 24th of March to the 7th of May 2022.