Thank you for visiting

My paintings are abstractions of the concrete jungle. Combinations of yin and yang, nature and technology, the past and the present painted in the same space.  My art is a reflection of a belief system founded on the principle of the inevitable nature of change. It is our only constant in life.  We grow old and die, buildings and monuments crumble to dust. Time goes by and progress marches on, but, as our society evolves are we improving or regressing? As a global community we have lost our connection with nature in our race to consume. As a result our communities are overrun with violence, pollution, and cultural and spiritual degradation. 

I look back to ancient man for inspiration, sampling images from places such as Africa, India, Native America, and China. My appropriation from these cultures is a sensitive one, for me these forms are metaphors for utopia. The paintings are abstractions of language, nature, urban landscape, technology, and the media. Compositions are built around a birds eye view of a natural Eden overlapped and encroached upon by forms that allude to industry and modern man. Form is layered over form hiding the layers below like Graffiti on city walls.

The physical act of layering is a metaphor for history. Images buried in the deepest layers are excavated from anthropology, reformed into my own subconscious script. It is a script that is fogged over and pushed back into the distance like a memory.

Thank you, and enjoy the work
Sincerely
Monica Lynn James