// --> Bascha Mon: New Land

 

 

XXXXXXBASCHA MON

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• Views: The Baur au Lac Magazine

• Yale Radio interview with Brainard Carey

• Joanne Mattera Art Blog: 60 Woman Artists over 60

• Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Art in the Time of Pandemic, Part 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Statement

 

My art is a confluence of received images from direct experience – friendship, home, children, nature, travel, world events, personal relationships – and working in the studio, alone. Ideas are elicited through the images of my everyday life and those seen in the daily news, then filtered through my artistic imagination into paint, sculpture and installation. I do not create art to portray my political concerns, but my political concerns find a way through, even in abstraction. My work is always a blend of lavish color with abundant emotional content and a subtle narrative quality that relates the imagery to our shared realities. The paintings are expressive and color-based, a complicated blend of abstraction and representation where abstraction serves to represent strong emotion, memory and aspiration, and representation serves as a method of storytelling connecting the image to the viewer. Each painting unfolds as I work varying in style and emotional subtext as my imagination, psychological state and the studio environment dictates. In the past two and a half years painting the New Land series my process has been inextricably connected to the mystical music of Olivier Messiaen. In particular, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus, performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Messiaen had synesthesia and I’m not sure how that has linked to my subconscious, but the images and colors seem to appear partially in response to the rhythms and swells of this music which plays continuously while I work each day. There have been times when I started out with an image that I have seen in the regular course of my day and the music was playing as I worked, but most of the time, with no initial image in mind, I stand with my hands over the paper until I feel something coming through the music.

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