Abstraction as a vehicle for emotive expression has exerted a powerful hold on the minds of artists of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The possibilities of an invented reality, where color lives and breathes, have inspired and hypnotized artists. They have used color to transform a static two dimensional space into a luminous environment, filled with distinct emotionality. Upon the departure from realism, artists have filled their invented realities with their own languages and visual vocabularies. Some making use of surrealist techniques to access the true reality of the unconscious, others using color and forms to express psychological states, inner emotional expression.
Born in 1980, in Wilmington Delaware, Monique Rollins received a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree from Syracuse University in New York in 2002. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting, a Master of Science in Theory, Criticism and History of Art degree, specializing in Venetian Renaissance, and a Museum Studies Certification from Pratt Institute. Monique’s artwork melds the surrealist process of exploring the unconscious with the languages of abstraction and expressionism into her own contemporary, very intimate, personal language of space form, and color. For Monique, every mark, color or form is a play on the balance and unbalance of mood, perception and very amplified feeling. Rollins draws on her formal background and traditional training to explore emotive color and the question of what exactly is perception. How can color and form become a vehicle to experiencing emotions and environments? She constructs then deconstructs time and memory using color and form to express her personal experience.
In 2010, Rollins left Brooklyn, New York to live in Florence, Italy. This move influenced Monique’s artwork tremendously. Feeling the effects of the geographical and cultural changes, her paintings have been vehicles to express the emotionality of such a change, the chaos and excitement, the isolation, the childlike exploration of a new environment. This turbulent excitement and spectrum of emotion is reflected in Monique’s current works, Nostalgia Paintings. In this series of large scale, oil on canvas paintings and charcoal drawings on paper, Rollins is not depicting visions from her eyes but from her thoughts. She forms a tension between the unconscious and the conscious. Rollins explores the relationships between feelings which stimulate thoughts and the capacity of thoughts to then trigger the imagination, allowing those thoughts to appear in front of ones eyes. She investigates the effect of color and form on emotional sensitivity. The colors and forms become a psychological environment, a pulsing, living breathing fantasy, at times bright and dynamic, other times dark and turbulent. Rollins creates a fantastical reality in her paintings, they are visualizations of her conscious thought, the fruits of a very fertile imagination.
This body of work includes a series of large scale charcoal drawings on paper. These drawings are monochrome and refer to space, and memories. They provide a very immediate, direct route back to her psyche. With limited depictions of mood with color, line drives the composition and creates imaginative structures. Monique builds a foundation, an environment for her fantasy objects and characters. The immediacy of drawing frees Monique to allow her mood to stimulate her thoughts. Her thoughts trigger her imagination. She then puts her ideas back into reality on the two dimensional plane of the paper. Whether in the paintings or the drawings the whole body gesture is essential to capture a sense of energy and movement.
At times, Monique’s compositions reflect the influence of landscape painting. Rollins began landscape painting at an early age. She has always had a tremendous sensitivity to nature space, form and light. Because of this influence, her artworks have a natural sense of atmosphere, space, and luminosity. However in her earlier works, there is more of a sense of space rather than a distinct idea taking a physical form, there is less activity of characters taking the attention within the landscape. The use of color in the earlier works portrays colors of reality, local color, not the color of an emotive reality. Little by little emotive color begins to enter her paintings. By 2002, Rollins is no longer using local color. However, her compositions are constructed much like traditional landscape spaces and atmospheres. A distinct vocabulary of forms, shapes, and objects entered her paintings. With local color proving to be too limiting, she transitioned into the complete submersion into the world of emotive color.
Rollins depicts mood and the influence of mood on the imagination. The images which reside in her imagination become realized into a concrete, very personal reality. The viewers find themselves in a living breathing environment, filled with visual images and ideas. The forms, colors and objects within each painting and drawing are in constant conversation with each other and the surrounding space. All of these elements together, create the symbolic language of Monique’s experiences and memories.
Download Resume (Word)
Download Resume (PDF)
