Alyssa Monks: The Photograph as a Painter’s Bully and Helper

Photography can be a representational artist’s best friend or worst bully, depending on the artist’s skill and discernment in using it.
Alyssa Monks: The Photograph as a Painter’s Bully and Helper
Alyssa Monks in her studio Courtesy of Stephen Churchill Downes
Christine Lin
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This is part 4 of a 9-part series. To see the full series, see At the Confluence 

The increasing prevalence of photography has fundamentally changed the way representational art is created and perceived in the modern day. At the Confluence examines how some of today’s artists have responded to the shift.

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NEW YORK—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.

Maybe because viewers are struck by their lifelikeness, they sometimes call them photorealist paintings, a label Monks feels misses the mark. Her interest is not in painting photos, though she does use photography throughout her process.

"Smirk," 2009, by Alyssa Monks. Oil on linen. (Courtesy of Alyssa Monks)
"Smirk," 2009, by Alyssa Monks. Oil on linen. Courtesy of Alyssa Monks
Christine Lin
Christine Lin
Author
Christine Lin is an arts reporter for the Epoch Times. She can be found lurking in museum galleries and poking around in artists' studios when not at her desk writing.
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