Born in 1978, Charmaine Zammit is a visual artist who received art education at middleschool and later on at the University of Malta where she obtained both her Bachelors’ and Masters’ Degree in Art Education. Currently Charmaine is a Head of Department of Art Education, a role which encourages her to work passionately to raise more awareness about the essence of art education towards a holistic education.
Ever since Charmaine was a child, she always felt the need to experiment, draw, paint and create. She thought and still thinks that such artistic instinct belongs to everyone, however some people give up or are somehow not encouraged enough to express themselves through the arts. Since she considers herself a life-long art student, she never stops learning through observing life and experimenting with different media to be able to choose the right vehicle for expressing her ideas.
Charmaine considers the artwork’s creative process as magic…an illusion that somehow transcends her into other realities, similar to music, which makes her forget about herself when she is completely absorbed in the artwork.
Although Charmaine aims to communicate her Art to the viewers, she avoids creating Art to meet the viewers' expectations. The driving force behind creating Art stems from a strong inner need to communicate her imagination and emotions, in much the same way that an opinion verbally expressed can sometimes be agreed with or not. When viewers ask her to explain her artworks, she finds it difficult to explain for the simple reason that she finds it hard to express in words what she instantly expresses on canvas. Hence, she often asks them to interpret her work from their own point of view, through questions like ‘what is the artwork saying to you?’, ‘how do you feel when you look at the artwork’, ‘what can you see?’ At first some viewers are afraid to make comments, on fearing that they do not have enough art knowledge but after a while, they start discussing about certain aspects of life and emotions evoked through the artworks. There are times when Charmaine intentionally stays behind the viewers, to eavesdrop their feedback while they are busy discussing stuff which catch their attention or somehow affect them while looking at her artworks. She finds such thought provoking discussions give her much more satisfaction than having viewers judging her artworks as ‘beautiful’ or her skills as ‘excellent’.
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