alyssa monks

Born 1977 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Alyssa Monks began oil painting as a child. She studied at The New School in New York and Montclair State University and earned her B.A. from Boston College in 1999. During this time she studied painting at Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence. She went on to earn her M.F.A from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art in 2001. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College in 2006 and has lectured at universities and institution nation wide. She has taught Flesh Painting at the New York Academy of Art, as well as Montclair State University and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. 

"Using filters such as glass, vinyl, water, and steam, I distort the body in shallow painted spaces. These filters allow for large areas of abstract design - islands of color with activated surfaces - while bits of the human form peak through. In a contemporary take on the traditional bathing women, my subjects are pushing against the glass “window”, distorting their own body, aware of and commanding the proverbial male gaze. Thick paint strokes in delicate color relationships are pushed and pulled to imitate glass, steam, water and flesh from a distance. However, up close, the delicious physical properties of oil paint are apparent. Thus sustaining the moment when abstract paint strokes become something else." 

"When I began painting the human body, I was obsessed with it and needed to create as much realism as possible. I chased realism until it began to unravel and deconstruct itself,” Alyssa states, “I am exploring the possibility and potential where representational painting and abstraction meet - if both can coexist in the same moment."

Monks's paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including "Intimacy" at the Kunst Museum in Ahlen, Germany and "Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820–2009" at the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts, New York. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Savannah College of Arts, the Somerset Art Association and the collections of Howard Tullman, Danielle Steele and Eric Fischl.

Alyssa has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painting three times and is a member of the New York Academy of Art's Board of Trustees. She is currently represented by David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan. Alyssa currently lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York.

I never use models that I don’t know or have a relationship with. When I am painting someone I am having a conversation with them. If I don’t know them, they become more of an object, less of an active subject. For this series it was important that these women were active subjects. There is this long tradition of bathers as coy and unaware — there is a voyeurism in it [the tradition]. Degas’s bathers are these blank-slated women, it was important to me that these were real women. They are not just objects of the male gaze.

Part of the challenge is to figure out what to use from the photo and what to invent.

I was using water as a filter, and it made me wonder what other filters I could come up with. First I covered myself with Vaseline and water. Then I used a vinyl shower curtain, and the shower doors were next. Some of the shower doors create this mosaic effect and some of them are flat; it seemed like the next natural evolution.

Creating a filter really spoke to me as a way to draw the viewer in. Putting a barrier in between the viewer and the subject invites the viewer to work a little harder. The glass also a reference to the windowpane that traditionally leads into another world. It talks about the surface of the painting itself, speaking directly about the tension between illusion and abstraction.

The glass also goes back to this idea of having these women be involved with conversation. They are confident enough to confront the viewers.