Monika Malewska
Monika Malewska was born in Warsaw, Poland. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in Canada and her MFA degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is currently teaching of art at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, US.
Malewska works in several art media, particularly painting, drawing, and photography. Her work has been shown in various galleries and museums, including Phoenix Gallery, NYC, Blank Space Gallery, NYC, Denise Bibro Fine Art Gallery, NYC, Camel Art Space, Brooklyn, NY, the Blue Star Complex in San Antonio, Texas, the Benton Museum in Storrs, Connecticut, the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA, to name a few. Her work has been featured in Huff Post (Arts and Culture section), Direct Art Magazine, Hi-Fructose, Fresh Paint Magazine, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture and other publications.
Interview with Monika Malewska
Hi Monika, tell us about your background. How and when did you first start to paint?
I have been drawing ever since I can remember, as probably most kids do, but creating images was something I enjoyed and felt very much at home doing. My first attempt at painting started with acrylic paints and took place in junior high school, in my art class, and continued throughout high school. My high school art classes were rather unstructured but my art teacher, Mr. Burdeny, introduced me to various mediums and was incredibly supportive as I was working on my art. Having free reign to draw and paint whatever I wanted was fundamentally important to my development as a visual thinker. While in high school, I also took figure study classes on Saturdays at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. When I was working on my BFA I discovered painting but also photography, and at that point I knew that making images was something I wanted to pursue as a career path. I was interested also in psychology, and for a while I entertained the idea of becoming an art therapist. However, at the end of my BFA program I majored in painting and realized that all I wanted to do was paint in my studio. I continued my studies with an MFA program. That completely changed my perception of what is possible and gave me the time and resources needed to focus on my art work.
How do you begin to work? What is your process like?
I begin my painting ideas with small sketches and drawings. I have a notebook where I draw and collect ideas through sketches, notes, and reference images. I also keep an images folder on my computer desktop that I revisit frequently and draw inspiration from. Once I have a rough idea of an image, I photograph an object or a still-life composition. Next, I compose my image using my photographs and other reference materials (e.g., images found online) in Photoshop. This process takes a while, and I draw and collage other elements until the composition makes sense to me formally. Then, I use my digital collage as a reference for my paintings. Further changes occur in the translation process as I go from a digital image to the physical process of painting.
Can you explain how you integrate the concept of late-stage capitalism into your artwork? How do representations of food and consumption reflect this theme?
I am interested in capturing certain aesthetic qualities that echo characteristics present in commercial ads for food and other consumer goods. This depiction involves the use of light and saturated colors that make banal, everyday objects seem staged and attractive. The paintings themselves are images of desire (eye candy) more than the objects they depict, not unlike the representation of objects used in commercial ads.
My paintings are also essentially still lives, a genre with a long history, from 1550–1720, reaching its height in seventeenth-century Netherlands. The Dutch Golden Era was represented by the Abundant Still Life's compositions, which celebrated the materiality of different goods and produce from around the world. Individual elements were composed elaborately, as a table displays in its visual spreads, and rendered in a masterful painting technique. The seventeenth-century Dutch were the true precursors and architects of globalization.
In the 21st century, we have immediate access to global markets with an almost unlimited range of goods, products, and services at the click of our mouse as we browse attractive website displays. Products can arrive at our doorstep in twenty-four hours. However, it is not just global material goods and products that we desire and purchase. In Frederic Jameson's terms, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything--not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities--becomes commodified and consumable.
My paintings manipulate the representation of objects to deconstruct the aesthetics of commercial ads and the politics of a world constituted by material desire. The images I paint are sort of a still-life vanitas composition that combines objects that do not belong together into aesthetically appealing configurations, appropriating the visual language of commercial ads. For instance, some of my most recent paintings include compositions of magnolia blossoms with ground beef rendered in pleasant pastel hues. The image looks aesthetically pleasing, yet the appearance of rough meat, magnified and presented in the shape of flowers, complicates our otherwise pleasant viewing experience.
Could you discuss how you balance the playful and ambiguous elements in your work with the deeper commentary on material desire and commercial aesthetics?
My most recent paintings combine vibrant gradient backgrounds with a subject matter that can be considered playful and banal, frequently focusing on fragmented representations of food and other objects of consumption, such as meat, fruits, flowers, plastic toys, or candy wrappings. I combine these seemingly unrelated objects through spatial organization, such as the use of color or placement in the composition. Each painting explores an assigned color scheme that relies on a specific combination of complementary and secondary color relationships that make the composition harmonious and visually appealing. There is also a sense of movement in my work that happens through the use of lines, which appear in different forms in each painting – something that is counterintuitive to a still-life genre. The attractive formal elements in my paintings often distract from the sometimes-unpalatable subject matter, such as ground beef. I am trying to create a visual tension between formal elements that seem perceptually attractive as a subject matter paired with those that can be perceived as problematic or even disturbing.
You mentioned using Photoshop for designing your paintings. How does your process of experimentation with gradients and digital tools inform the final physical composition on canvas?
I design my paintings in Photoshop. This digital drawing practice allows me to experiment and make mistakes that can be saved as work-in-progress files, leading to a final design. I experimented with the Photoshop Gradient tool to design my painting's background, which I painted later using acrylic paint and an airbrush on canvas. I also experiment with designing my 3-D digital brushes, allowing me to generate various lengths, thicknesses, colors, and swirl-like forms in my digital image design. The digital drawing serves as a reference for my physical painting, which is acrylic and oil on canvas. The final work evolves in the painting process of "translation." Some aspects get lost, while others are gained during the undertaking. In the end, my painting looks different from the digital drawing, but the process of working things out in Photoshop is essential.
Your paintings offer "illusionistic passageways" or portals to other visual dimensions. Can you explain how you create this sense of depth and multistability in your work?
My paintings combine elements that exist on a couple of different illusionistic layers. There is a surface layer of the gradient background. Cutout shapes on this layer allow the viewer a deeper glimpse into the deletional reality underneath the background surface. Some of my paintings' sections reveal fragments of still-life arrangements. In other paintings, the undersurface layer is shallow. My ground beef compositions, for instance, belong to the latter category. The top layer in most of my compositions also contains three-dimensional-looking swirls flooding across the surface.
How do you navigate the tension between the static nature of still-life subjects and the visually dynamic configurations you aim to create in your paintings?
The fragmented still-life elements in my paintings exist inside a multiverse of delineated shapes, like layers, seeming to conceal more than reveal. Overall, there is a sense of multistability, an ambiguous perceptual experience that shifts between two or more spatial interpretations, providing new visual experiences.
Could you talk about the significance of the fragmented still-life elements within the multiverse of delineated shapes in your compositions?
The still-life elements are the key contextual components of my composition. However, I am interested in how the composition is perceived as a whole. This can be understood through the application of Gestalt theory. The terms "structure" and "organization" were focal for the Gestalt psychologists. "Whole" has priority, and the "parts" are defined by the structure of the whole, rather than the other way around. The viewer first will perceive the entire composition as a whole and then identify the realistic still-life objects and elements in fragmented shapes. In some of my paintings, the viewer may perceptually complete some shapes automatically, even if the representational parts of the image are missing. Seeing the scattered abstract shapes helps our brain interpret ambiguous visual information and organize them into something that appears more compositionally cohesive. For instance, in my Colt, Wine Decanter, and a Monarch Butterfly Composition (diptych), we tend to perceive the colt, the decanter, and the wine glass on both sides of the diptych, even if they are painted as incomplete fragments of abstract shapes. Our perception can also shift between figure and ground, depending on what we want to look at in a given moment. We can choose to experience the representational still-life (even though it is fragmented and incomplete), or we can shift to the perception of abstract shapes. When this cognitive process becomes activated in our mind, we shift from processing all of the individual elements in a composition to seeing the entire shape as a whole. As a result, we fill in the blank, so to speak, and perceive elements and objects where none were painted.
What inspired you to explore the concept of metastability in your work, and how does it contribute to the overall viewer experience?
As a visual artist, I am generally interested in perception and how our senses create the so-called "reality" of our experience. I am also interested in how technology has shaped our awareness of experiencing space and time. For instance, we can open multiple windows on our computer desktop or phone and seamlessly move from one location in space and time without moving an inch physically. This constant existence in a virtual multiverse defines how we live and experience everyday "reality." Our constant shifting through the internet windows and how it affects us perceptually and cognitively as we "inhabit" more than one space at a time is what I like to think about and explore when I do my work.
Can you discuss any challenges you encounter when translating digital compositions to physical paint on canvas, particularly in maintaining the balance between representation and abstraction?
I work traditionally with my oil paintings. Since grad school, I have been teaching myself and refining the techniques of the so-called "old masters." I use underpainting, body paint, and glazing layers to achieve carefully rendered luminous painting surfaces.
Sometimes, I get carried away when I digitally design my compositions and realize, “wait a minute, I am the one who will need to paint this!” However, I enjoy the challenge of seeing if I can make my painting resemble the digital drawing I have constructed. There is always the physical aspect of paint as a medium that a painter struggles with. For instance, I recently taught myself how to work with an airbrush (I am still learning), and it took me a while to figure out how to use my airbrush to achieve that sense of transparency of a digital gradient effect created in Photoshop. The initial painting outcomes were far from satisfactory.
How do you hope viewers will interpret and engage with the layers of meaning and perceptual experiences embedded within your paintings?
As an artist, I have little control over how others will perceive the work. I make my work to satisfy my curiosity and creative needs, and I hope others will also enjoy aspects of my art. Having said that, on a formal level, the work can be enjoyed for its qualities of color, shape, use of space and optical movement, and an overall sense of design that stimulates the perceptual experience. I also hope some viewers may appreciate the tension between aesthetically palatable elements and those that can be perceived as unsavory. On a more conceptual level, I hope that viewers are motivated to pause for a moment and ask questions about the work.
How has the city you live and work in influenced you and the art you create?
I have lived in many cities and locations, including Warsaw, Poland; Berlin, Germany; Winnipeg, Canada; San Antonio, Texas; and Connecticut, near NYC. Currently, I do not live in the city most of the year. I live in rural central Pennsylvania, where I teach art at a liberal arts college. I spend summers in Warsaw, Poland, the city where I grew up. I have not been influenced directly by any particular city since I constructed my reality indoors and work from a still-life as a reference. My iconography does not require an urban setting directly for inspiration. However, living in San Antonio, Texas, inspired my color pallet and an affinity for rendering meat in my art.
Describe a real-life situation that inspired you.
I respond to a particular subject matter, a specific object, a food item, the color or texture of a botanical specimen, or a lighting situation. I am also attracted to things that are not conventionally beautiful but rather grotesque. For instance, at a grocery store, I will spend a long time in the meat or fruit section to plan my new painting rather than buying food strictly for consumption. Thus, my food purchases are often determined by certain aesthetic qualities rather than their nutritional or culinary potential. I remember spotting the most unappetizing and fat-looking chicken in the meat section at a Walmart, which inspired one of my paintings. As soon as I saw that fat-dripping (hormones-induced) chicken, I knew what I would paint next.
