ABOUT MONICA

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My art practice collaborates with mixed media to explore complexity and duality through natural systems, combining organic and traditional forms. Increasingly, I am drawn to moments when these systems are deliberately disrupted, such as instances of collapse, redirection, or scarring that expose the limits of control. These material tensions mirror humanity’s impact on our natural environment.

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Rather than functioning as opposition, duality operates here as a codependent system in which structure creates the conditions for freedom to emerge. This productive tension between rigidity and fluidity mirrors my own position between science and art, and between responsibility and creative instinct. The work exists in that in-between space, where structure is both challenged and necessary.  In this way, the work positions accident and intention as interdependent forces, reinforcing duality not as a binary, but as a dynamic system in which control and surrender coexist.

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This approach is informed by the work of contemporary Swedish artist Emma Lindström, whose controlled process allows organic processes to unfold, and by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who coined the term “accidental painting” in the 1930s. Siqueiros’s method of pouring paints of differing viscosities and densities embraced chance while remaining grounded in material logic. The resulting formations, produced through principles of fluid dynamics such as Rayleigh–Taylor instability, as seen in the behavior of oil and water, demonstrate how unpredictability arises not from chaos, but from structured physical laws. These experiments later influenced abstract artists, including Jackson Pollock, situating chance as a collaborator rather than an antagonist.

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As the artistic steward of each painting, I begin by pouring, then pushing and pulling the thin mediums to evoke processes of erosion, transportation, and deposition.  Usually, the introduction of clean, straight lines or grids to impose order comes afterwards, while sprays and splatters embody chaos.  At times, I explore the edge of chaos through fractals, curvature, and cellular forms using satin enamel paints or solvents.  The interference may take the form of carving into thick paint with linocut tools, preventing layers from fully drying, drawing with charcoal or graphite, or applying paint so heavily that it skins over and cracks as deeper layers continue to cure.  These energies accumulate and organize within a single space, layered over time. 

 

Checkerboards and grids recur throughout my work as motifs of duality seeking balance: light and dark, good and evil, subtraction and addition. Traditional painting techniques and a greater degree of control in the final stages pull these seemingly disparate elements into one complex system.  In this way, the work positions accident and intention as interdependent forces, reinforcing duality not as a binary, but as a dynamic system in which control and surrender coexist.

 

Like a river, organization in my paintings follows meandering paths that ultimately generate energy and direction.  My intuition responds to the movement of paint, allowing the work to exist between calculation and freedom, complexity and order, chaos and transformation, much like urbanization encroaching upon open space. In my Flow series, I collected water samples from rivers across Montana and mixed them directly into the paints.  In doing so, the paintings became both noun and verb. That is, a state of being and a force of movement.  The work examines how something can simultaneously connect and divide, remain calm and surge, revealing harmony within contradiction.

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I am endlessly fascinated by how these systems intertwine, layer, and communicate, with and without human hands. Painting becomes a playful portal, in which time and space feel fluid. At a fundamental level, this process teaches me how my biological system (my body, the canvas) interacts with my environment (nature, paint) to shape emotion and action, and how the feedback loop moves in both directions.

 

Whether a painting reads macroscopic or microscopic is left to the viewer.  The intersections of science and art, nature and the built environment, Mom and artist, color and restraint, negative space and chaos, subtlety and boldness, creation and observation keep me grounded and ecstatic. By bringing natural elements into the built world, I hope my work offers others the same joy, surprise,  calm, excitement and gratitude that painting and nature bring me.

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