Karin Obojkovits completed her honours degree in Fine Arts at Wits University and from there went to Paris to work in a print making studio. Her European journey continued to Salzburg in Austria where she explored the method of stone lithography.
Whilst in Austria, at the age of 21, she was accepted into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna for a course of Masterclass of painting.
To gain acceptance onto such a course is no mean feat. Professors indulging and specialising in different styles accept a maximum of 20 students each to learn and study under them in their chosen field.
Obojkovits, who went by her maiden name of Dando at that time, was chosen to work under Professor Wolfgang Hollegha. Hollegha is considered the leading abstract painter in Austria.
Here, Obojkovits was given studio space and assisted Hollegha but was largely left on her own to discover herself in art, “It was about finding your own voice and your own development in that space,” she told the LETABA HERALD.
She remained at the Academy of Fine Arts for another five years and worked alongside her now husband, Günter Obojkovits in the studio.
The couple married in Austria and their son was born there. However, when he was two years old, the family made the move to South Africa, “We had to make a decision, where did we want to bring up our child? In a city in Austria or on a farm in South Africa? And so we made the move.”
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Upon returning to South Africa, Karin and Günter soon got involved with a State-run aftercare centre in Nkowankowa. The residents of the centre made crafts as a form of occupational therapy. The Obojkovits’ saw an opportunity to train them on how to mosaic the outside of ceramic pots.
Karin and Günter would draw the outline of a pattern onto the pots and then the patients in the centre would follow the lines with mosaic tiles to finish off the product. However, as changes in Government came about, the aftercare centre was closed down as it was no longer subsidised.
During this transition time, Karin and Günter were adamant to keep the pottery decorating business on track and so Karin set about training and employing women to carry on decorating the pottery work.
The enterprise soon shifted from pots to trophy animals, and the business really started gaining momentum. Soon the team were commissioned to create colour mosaic Impala heads for the hallway of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.
Orders from all over the world then came flooding in, including from the Radisson Hotel group and The Venetian hotel in Macao, Hong Kong.
At the latter, Karin and her team were commissioned to create 172 panels for their luxury suites, which summed a total of 52 tonnes of mosaics.
The mosaic business was booming until the financial crash really started to hit in 2008, “We went to the art indaba and everything started unravelling, people were being put out of business.”
Karin mentions that of 36 decor shops that she used to supply to, only two are still in existence today.
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In the same year of the art indaba, she received a phone call from Stanford Lake College who were in need of an art teacher for one term. The one term stint turned into a nine year long journey with the college and only in 2016 did she leave the position.
Karin says she is glad to be painting again, “Whilst we had the mosaic business, I felt like I had nothing to say. Teaching brought me back to art.”
Since leaving Stanford, Karin has been focusing on commissioned portraits and also designs the beautiful watercolour artwork for the Old Packhouse distillery’s craft gins and rums – a Dando family business.
She is also experimenting with watercolours on a clay board medium, “Paper is more forgiving. On the clay boards, you cannot cover any mistakes,” and is also working on a stunning Fynbos landscape piece.
Now that the coals of her artistic flair have been re-ignited, there seems to be no stopping her creative flow.
