Oil and Water: paintings of Alyssa Monks

Alyssa Monks

Born in 1977 is an American painter currently based out of Brooklyn. She specialized in large oil paintings and is recognized both in the United States and Europe for her pieces including figures obscured by water, steam, and vinyl.Her most notable series of works is centered around figures in bathrooms, tubs, and showers. 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.

Alyssa Monks’s figure paintings have a sort of gritty intimacy to them. Men and women seem to languish in the isolation of their own nakedness, their vulnerability and fragility writ large on the canvas but obscured by vapor.Monks has long been intrigued by the visual distortions and abstractions water produces on solid forms. By placing her models in the bath, she uses water, steam, and glass to add mood and mystery to otherwise straightforward figures.There is a beautiful sensuality to Monk’s luscious figurative paintings. Her subjects are often presented with barriers between themselves and the viewer, and are rendered with vibrant color. The presence of water calls to mind ancient symbols of creation, fertility, protection and sexuality.

Each painting begins as hundreds of photographs of her models, dripping with water, pressed against foggy glass, or submerged in the bath. Monks then sifts through them, collecting ideas for color and composition. Then she creates drawings from the photograph and uses the drawings as references. This way her painting is closer to the raw, emotional image she wants the viewer to see, rather than merely what the camera saw.
The tension in her paintings is sustained by the composition and also by the surface quality itself. Each brushstroke is thickly applied oil paint, like a fossil recording every gesture and decision, expressing the energetic and empathic experience of the handmade object. “I strive to create a moment in a painting where the viewer can see or feel themselves, identify with the subject, even be the subject, connect with it as though it is about them, personally.”

She describes her work:
"Using filters such as glass, vinyl, water, and steam, I distort the body in shallow painted spaces. These filters allow for large areas of abstract design - islands of color with activated surfaces - while bits of the human form peak through [...] I am exploring the possibility and potential where representational painting and abstraction meet - if both can coexist in the same moment."