Who and from where are you?
My name is Monique van Steen, I was born and raised in Holland, but the Universe had planned to put me in Spain after my first 20-something years, so now I live in the beautiful city called Barcelona.
How you got into this?
As long as I can remember I created… but then I guess all young humans do, until they get to a time when the older ones tell them repeatedly to quit “wasting time”. I guess my grid was just a bit toucher than the usual, and I was fortunate enough to have parents who supported me No-matter-what. My dad would have rather seen me studying for a and adjusting me to a regular office-job, but upon visiting the fine-arts-faculty on an open day, my gut feeling told me that that was the path for me and no reasoning could get me out of that.
What is your driving force?
That’s hard to tell. It comes from within, a indescribable need to express myself manifesting art. There was a time in my life, after my partner (he was a painter) had died and I (26yrs) went through a time of deep grief, leaving me without the force to struggle my way into the art-world (it’s a long, hard push to get in the circle). At that time I had a very comfortable and creative job as a ceramist on the amazingly beautiful island Ibiza. With the loveliest boss one could ever ask for. So I told myself that the dream of becoming an autonomous artist was a silly one,
and that I had everything any creative person could ever ask for.
Yet….. 6 months later: some weird urge, bubbling up from my bowels, to make my own stuff (instead of the stuff I was told to make) became so strong that I started to spend my free time self expressing though art. At that point I recogniezed to myself: “well, if the need is this strong…. might as well make my living out of it”.
What kind of work you do and why?
Back in Ibiza, approx 2003/4 I started with Chinese-ink drawings, not much later the need for colors kicked in, plus the need for large sizes. This has evolucionized into the very colorful female portraits that people know from me now. The drippings I use stem directly from the Chinese ink, I couldn’t find such a potent black from acrylic paint, so I tried all kinds of other paints and finally found that the synthetic enamels have the same powerful presence.
I usually paint female portraits/figures, as they all resemble me… in an emotional way. The 2 latest series that I am working on are the “Inner Beauties” and the “7 Sins”. Which to me are different faces of the same coin and am enjoying a lot the self-investigation that I need in order to express it on canvas.
Some of the artists that have influenced me are: Egon Schiele and a lot of the other impressionist painters, the Art Nouveau-style, the pop-art movement and especially the contemporary urban and pop-surrealist movement.
When I see art that makes me go like: "ooooh, that is so captivating”, I study what is so good about it: color/composition/layers/outlines or the lack of all these and once understood it, it sips through to my subconscious brain, that integrates it with the already existing structure of how I paint…
This is for example happening now with the background of “Envy” where I am now using a background in the same way Michael Carson does sometimes, painting Damask-“wallpaper” (see WIP foto)
Apart from the direct sales from my studio, I work with a few commercial artgalleries throughout the world; for example 19karen in Australia, Lendnine in Graz, Austria, Artdistrickt in Amsterdam, Forsight32 in Jordan, am interested in broadening my connections throughout the world, especially in the USA, Canada and Japan.
I hope you enjoyed reading where I come from and that this will make you want to contact or follow me on my Facebook or Instagram pages, or perhaps it even has made you wanting to support me and get some hand-signed prints from my Big-cartel-shop, if so, click these links!
IG: https://www.instagram.com/monique_paints/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/pintoraMoniquevanSteen/
web: http://www.moniquevansteen.com
Prints: http://moniquevansteenshop.bigcartel.com/
All Images are copyright by: Monique van Steen
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