Review

Amanda Marie Monson's drawings balance line and space, dark and shadow

Amanda Marie Monson, "Like An Eagle," photogravure from Seraphim series, 9" x 12". All images: courtesy of the artist

The winged, finely-feathered creatures of Amanda Marie Monson’s drawings, their wingspans filmed with the caviar of unknown prey, could be unholy beasts borne from the Hadean cesspools of some H.P. Lovecraft story. But she derives her inspiration from the Bible — specifically, a passage in Revelations that tells of beasts called seraphims with faces like lions, calves, men and birds, but “full of eyes before and behind.”

Monson, a senior graduating from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in spring 2010 with a degree in fine art, limns most of her creatures with ballpoint pen so sweetly and delicately that their wispy down and thickets of eyes appear braced to alight from the fettering of the paper. The carved features of a lion stare nobly from within a couching of feathers and bulbous eyes. The six wings of a hawkish bird fan forward, a gnarled hand cresting the end of one. The infinitude of detail in the feathers recalls Ernesto Caivano’s mythic birds, but the shadowiness of her vision conjures German artist Alfred Kubin.

She says each drawing usually takes her a week or two to complete. She sketches the entirety of the image first and then applies layer after layer of pen stroke to create a heavily textured final image with incredible variance in depth, inumbrated in places and sparser in others.

“All my creatures seem to be floating,” Monson says, though it is a removed observation more than an admission of intention. “They’re never grounded.”

Amanda Marie Monson is a senior at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who anticipates her BA in fine art in Spring 2010.

In person, Monson is a mirror of her work, a will-o'-the-wisp in lace accents with a Victorian refinement to her features. She’s exhibited in two solo shows, most recently at the Pi Gallery in August 2009. Her yellow-bound sketchbook reveals faces halved and segmented by aqueous ovals, eyes within eyes, and Bible verses and phrases brambled by curlicues tumbling to twirling rapids. “He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds,” reads one such adorned page. A single feather arches along the diagonal of another page, its filaments no less defined than in her seraphim drawings. An impeccable reproduction of a Goya drawing — a class assignment — darkens another page. When asked to translate the inscription below the original Goya, she laughs and says she doesn’t know. She had enrolled at UMKC planning to major in both Spanish and art, but she dropped Spanish early on and continued with the printmaking and drawing program.

Neat, measured and perfectly horizontal notes fill several pages, their margins dotted with idle and unrealized doodles. A peacock parades on another sheet, its plumage of simulated oculi echoing the seraphim’s besighted wings. She credits her mother with condoning ‘doodling’ as long as Monson’s ears remained tuned to whatever was being said, be it a sermon or a class lecture.

Amanda Marie Monson, "Like A Lion," photogravure, 12" x 9"

Monson comments upon the ‘structural similarities’ between above-ground and subterranean flowerings in a drawing of a tree with its branches and roots tapered and parsed to tremulous hair-breadth fissures. As above, so below — many of Monson’s sketches encompass both illumination and shadow, the light and dark that constitute the material world. She doesn’t find her attraction to darker images at odds with her faith — the Bible, after all, is rife with the suffering that enriches its promised rewards of liberation, innumerable crags and caves upon the face of its holy mountain.

“My mother read to us from the Bible at night before bed,” Monson explains. “I hated it,” she says, and then retreats: “I didn’t hate it necessarily, but I didn’t like sitting and listening for such long periods of time, so my mother let me draw.” In addition to the propelling force of her faith, the Bible’s trove of fantastic images and depictions of ethereal dimensions — as well as its complement of shadowy nether — give Monson the seeds for so many of her renderings.

Amanda Marie Monson, "Like a Cow," ballpoint (Bic) inkpen, 9" x 12", from a series of four drawings included in her solo exhibition at Pi Gallery in August 2009. Monson describes this series of drawings and prints as: "Images from the past, thoughts currently mysterious and all still yet to be seen."

Like the dreamworld artists she most admires – Gustav Dore and Odillion Redon – Monson’s most extraordinary gift is her ability to shape and spawn her fabulous beasts from the taxonomy of her own imagination. The Bible passage from which she generated a whole series of drawings is awed and terse, the majesty of the beasts described only to preface their deference to the indescribable majesty of God. -re-

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