Alyssa Monks
What's the best piece of advice anyone has even given you? Some of the mos t important life lessons I think I’ve learned came to me this year. The first one is simple. As much as possible, live in the p r e s e n t mome n t . Ruminating over the p a s t o r f u t u r e i s uninspiring and just c a u s e s a n x i e t y o r defeat. Creativity comes from really listening and noticing what is around you as much as possible without judgment or anticipation.
It’s a
difficult practice, but when I can manage it, I do feel very connected and clear. The ideas that come from there feel true and deliberate. Another piece of advice I love is simple: “It’s not about you.” Just forget what people might be thinking about you or what you might look like or what they think of your work or your choices. Most of the time, it’s not about you; so don’t waste your time trying to control other people’s experiences. Focus on your own experience. It really frees you up to find your own voice, opinion, and direction. Self- criticism is only useful if it doesn’t paralyze or inhibit. A final bit of advice I picked up lately is that the path to connection and creativity is through making yourself vulnerable. I started to ask the question: why do we make art anyway?
Alyssa Monks Reserve 2011 32x48 oil on linen What I came to understand was that more than being the isolating, lonely
existence of painting in my studio day after day, painting was a way to connect to other people ultimately. And the connection was easy and sincere when you allowed yourself to be imperfect and vulnerable in your life and in your work. To expose and even celebrate your human idiosyncrasies is to allow yourself and your art to be accessible and moving.
What are you working on right now? The above ideas have brought me to realize a longing to reconnect to painting in a way I did when I was an adolescent, unburdened by expectations. I have been experimenting with making some abstract paintings, distorted self-portraits, and some just intuitive “messes”. It’s been really exciting to paint like no one’s watching. I’ve always painted exactly what I wanted and never felt pressured to do otherwise, but I wanted to see what could happen if I wasn’t worried about judgment – my own, or anyone else’s.
If
there was no inhibition or concern for correct anatomy or illusion or even an idea of aesthetic beauty or rules of any kind, what kind of marks would I make and what would the end result look like? I have always painted for the simple curiosity to see what something would look like. I’m just interested to see what it would look like if I painted with the skills of a realist painter, but the uninhibited intuition of a three year old. This is opening new doors for me as my work gets loser, thicker, and less realistic. To me it feels more honest, more direct, immediate, free, and vulnerable. I feel that I’m moving through a passageway to another way of constructing a painting. I won’t stop here. I don’t think I will be an abstract painter. I love the human body too much to let it go completely. But this process of uninhibited play is bringing me to another phase of my work and I’m looking forward to seeing what it looks like.
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