“Your paintings are very ambitious,” teachers of Alyssa Monks, a contemporary figurative painter from Brooklyn, N.Y., would say throughout her college career.
Monks came to ETSU on Monday, Sept. 8, 2008, to give a lecture on “Rendering Flesh”, her concentration since high school.
Monks “uses photographic references, often images of herself, as fodder for exploration,” said Mira Gerard, painting professor and advisor to the Student Painting and Drawing Association (SPDA).
Monks said that she mainly explores what is unique about the female form and how the paint being used “becomes a swimming flesh.”
Monks, a young successful artist about 10 years out of graduate school, has had solo shows in New York and Anaheim, Calif.
She is also on the faculty of continuing education at the New York Academy of Art, where she is an instructor of flesh painting and working from photographic reference. Monks is also an instructor at Montclair State University.
She has a B.A. from Boston College and an M.F.A. in painting from New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art.
She has won numerous awards including the Greenshields Grant for Painting award; which she has won three times, the Academic Scholarship Award from the New York Academy of Art and the New York Academy of Art Summer Exhibition, First Prize, among others.
During last Monday’s lecture, Monks showed the evolution of her work from high school to the present, modeled after presentations she has seen during her college career, which “many students responded positively to, noting how she had developed over time,” Gerard said.
Monks’ work changed throughout college from a very expressive and bold undergraduate painting style to a controlled and slick graduate school style.
Monks commented that now she is trying to find a way to paint somewhere in between, to be both expressive and slick. In order for Monks to do this, she said she must “unlearn” everything she learned in college, something one of her professors told her would help her growth as an artist.
Monks strives to force the viewer to work a little harder to get into the painting in her most recent works.
“I want to see how far I can push the image out of clear focus and still have it be convincing and realistic,” Monks said in an interview with Rosecrans Baldwin in January 2008.
In some ways, Monks accomplishes this through using “filters,” including water, Vaseline, sheets and comforters, shower doors and shower curtains.
She does not use these materials “on” her painting, but discovers interesting ways in which to include the figures with the objects, making the paintings look more than real.
One example of these filters includes using water in the painting to distort the figure, so that “the water destroys the form,” Monks said. “Water can be just as destructive as it is life giving and refreshing.”
Another filter Monks uses are bed sheets and comforters. After waking up in a hotel room one morning with her boyfriend, Monks said she noticed how the sheets looked as if they were a “sea of white folds and ripples and reflections.” She said she immediately had to take a photograph as a prelude to her future painting, “The Morning After.”
Monks likes to “use the paintbrush in a really loose, painterly and tactile way so that when you come close to her paintings they become very abstract looking even though they appear polished in photographs or from a short distance away,” Gerard said.
Monks’ paintings are “massive eye candy for me,” said Whitney Ellison, a senior in art with a drawing concentration. “The way she crops the figure is fantastic. It’s breathtaking that someone would put that much detail into something.”
Before the lecture, Monks was able to spend some quality time with art students, critiquing their work. During this time she was able to do a demonstration of painting techniques.
“She had a great time here and was really impressed with the quality of the paintings and drawings that the ETSU students are doing in our program.” Gerard said.
The Student Painting and Drawing Association (SPDA), which made this event possible, with help from the SGA, “has been bringing internationally renowned visiting artists and art critics to campus for several years now,” Gerard said.
The SPDA “does a variety of types of fundraising such as annual art Valentine’s Day cards, hand painted tote-bags, and of course applying for Bucfunds for visiting artists and for trips . we’re thinking of going to L.A. next.”
For more information on Alyssa Monks, visit her Web site at http://alyssmonks.com. Monks currently has a show called “Liquid” at the Sarah Bain Gallery in Anaheim, Calif, until Sept. 28.

Author