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 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 want to create paintings that evolve, are layered, and alive. My work leans into the sensual and the poetic, inviting the viewer to linger in intimacy and feeling. Each canvas unfolds as a dialogue between presence and absence, gesture and silence — a story that resists finality, yet carries a pulse of its own.
Moving into the language of abstraction that frees me, and shakes off anything I may have constructed as taboo,I am drawn to painters like Joan Mitchell and Susan Rothenberg, whose work balances power with poetry, rigor with vulnerability. In that spirit, my practice continues to evolve — moving between the romantic and the cerebral, searching for a language that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. Female abstract painters inherently carry a different knowing with them, and I am no different as I fill space.
For me, painting is not about perfect beauty, but about becoming — a process of transformation, always in motion, always alive.” -MLR