Monica van den Dool

  Two Time Art Party Participant

Lucky Canary

Artist’s Website

www.monicavandendool.com

Artist’s Statement

Still Lifes

This body of work is inspired by the genre of still life painting (functioning traditionally as a reminder of mortality) and particularly by the compositions of Chardin. Simplified but realistic representations of game animals are forcefully combined and contrasted with cartoonishly glazed and artificially bright and vibrant elements (dripping oranges, bright yellow canaries, flowing drips). The glazed elements are generally pushed into the wet clay of the larger sculpture, and the entire sculpture is dried, fired, and re-fired together, resulting in many cracks and stresses. This process and the whole jarring composition are meant to correlate with the complexity and strain of our attempt to understand our mortality in its entirety.