BIO:
Monica's background was in professional illustration, with a client list of clients like Hatchett Books, Abrams, Harper Collins, and the Wall Street Journal. Monica illustrated live from the runway during London Fashion Week and Shanghai Fashion Week before she began painting fine art full-time. In 2012, Monica saw an opening in the creative business space and founded and hosted the podcast Smart Creative Women, where she interviewed over 300 women who were in the business of creativity. Prior to this she traveled and worked as an international flight attendant. With wanderlust and creativity leading her, she gathered her experiences and shifted into painting and now write about the creative process on the Substack, The Smart Creative.
STATEMENT:
MONICA LEE RICH
b. Vicenza, Italy
“I have moved into the language of abstraction that frees me, and shakes off anything I may have constructed as taboo. My mark-making has evolved to portray an inner life with its mysteries, passions, and its inherent femaleness.
When the painter of an abstract work of art is a woman herself, she is able to possess a narrative exclusive to her sexuality, which she carries with her everywhere and in every construct.
In my work, it plays out as subtle electricity, laced with the erotic, dipping into a divine, spiritual, or larger story. I approach my work from a romantic perspective, applying a Baroque sensibility as I explore an imagined heightened sensual tension.
I take the conversations of old masters into my studio, which once portrayed the feminine as deflowered, fertile, and moving towards decay, and shift them to the interior world of a modern female and the space she inhabits. My work combines elements of nature and the interior life of a female. Nature knows exactly what to do, and has its cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without sorrow or mourning. Nature, not being at war with itself, can serve as an interesting example of soft empowerment.” -MLR