Artwork in the Nancy Toomey Fine Art Beauty in Lockdown Catalogue
MONICA LUNDY, Aurora, 2017
Coffee, Burned Paper and Charcoal on Khadi Paper, 55 x 38 Inches Unframed
$11,500
Aurora comes from the Monica Lundy exhibition Deviance – Women in the Asylum During the Fascist Regime, a rumination on the incarceration of Italian women and girls during the era of Mussolini, which was born of a year spent abroad in Rome, Italy. In this series of paintings, Lundy focuses on portraiture of inmates from the Psychiatric Hospital of Sant’Antonio Abate. She uses coffee, burned paper, and charcoal on handmade paper with a reductive hand: just as much as media is added, it is then subsequently removed, erased, or burned away… More »
Thoughts on Lockdown
On February 1, 2020, I had just returned to Italy from California, and took an apartment in Milan for 3 months to see if I might like to have a base there. Just 18 days later, the first COVID-19 infection was announced near Milan, and that same day my partner and I made the decision to evacuate (we knew that the virus was already everywhere, and it was not safe to be there). Since then, we have been staying at his cottage in the countryside north of Venice, where we also share a warehouse-studio. Since lock-down began, we have been spending long days in the studio, working on our individual projects as well as launching into a new collaborative series that combines our distinctive practices (Daniele Puppi is a multimedia artist).
While many aspects of life have come to a grinding halt during this pandemic, art is not one of them. The reason for that is twofold: the first being that the very nature of how most artists work [alone] in the studio is not significantly impacted by this extreme time of imposed self-isolation (in fact, we relish self-isolating). But more than that, it is because creating art is not simply a “profession” but an addiction.
We must create. In any situation in life, no matter how constrictive or oppressive, the act of creating is an instant portal into an inner, expansive world of freedom and joy. That is why artists will go to great lengths, and travel great distances, to pursue a path of deepening self-discovery and expanding one’s life in art.
Quarantine Diary – “The Cherry Tree” (Work in Progress)
Exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art
Deviance – Women in the Asylum During the Fascist Regime
August 22 to October 13, 2018
