Monks’s work explores narrative figuration. Currently she is playing with the tension between abstraction and realism in the same work, using different filters to visually distort and disintegrate the body. In this shallow painted space, the subject is pushing against our real space with pulsating vibrations of color that can make a painted body seem to have blood pumping through it. Strokes of thick, succulent paint in delicate color relationships are pushed and pulled into place to imitate glass, steam, water and flesh and create a narrative in the painted surface. The result of this pushing and pulling of realism is a confrontation of the tension between mortality and vitality. Striving for anatomical and realistic accuracy, it is her intention to convey an arresting vision that compels the viewer to feel their own humanness. It is Monks’s intent to relate visually the contemporary female experience with sensitivity, empathy, and integrity.
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Alyssa Monks earned her MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art. She additionally studied at Montclair State College, the New School, and Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College. She is Continuing Education Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she teaches Flesh Painting and teaches Figure Painting at Montclair State University. Alyssa has been awarded a Grant for Painting from the Elizabeth Greensheilds Foundation three times. Alyssa currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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