Artwork Description
Monica Lundy – Acute Melancholia
Dimensions: 30 x 22″ paper
Year: 2016
Medium: intaglio
Edition: 5/25
Artist Monica Lundy has spent her life living in different cultures, often cultures where the rights of marginalized members of society are squelched. She grew up in Saudi Arabia, and has lived between Italy and the United States as a mature artist. Lundy paints, burns, draws, and sculpts images of people she never knew, but took into her heart, from photographs and stories she gathered on her journey.
Lundy practices compassion for women who have been mischaracterized throughout history. Many of the women Lundy paints were inhabitants of mental institutions and jails in the early 1900s. She paints from photographs retrieved from psychiatric and incarceration files, always devoting only one portrait as a memorial to each woman. The root of Lundy’s compassion for her subjects comes from the injustices they suffered, such as being locked up for such “crimes” as promiscuity, disobeying their husbands, or being too loud. She does not judge or preach about the past treatment of these women in her paintings; she simply embraces the facts of life of women she never knew, embodying compassion by virtue of her attention. Monica “paints” with coffee and charcoal, incorporating these elements of everyday reality of the women into her creations, as if the shared materials help her better comprehend their reality. She uses fire as a transformative element of creation and destruction in the portraits she creates, almost as if this primal element has been used to both destroy and empower these (and all) women at different points in their lives. By using materials and presenting imagery of women who suffered unjustly in the past for “offenses” we regard as fully acceptable today, Monica Lundy helps us experience the feeling of interconnectedness that unites humankind.