Carmen Monne
Artist Statement
Shows & Events
Description of the work:

Images that combine actual locations and symbolic personal imagery. Watercolors that strive to contrast transparent and opaque mediums, achieve richness in details and experimental textures, and use hue and value to define form and space.

Most of my current work is the direct result of my experiences returning to my homeland, Cuba, for the first time in over 30 years. An expatriate lives in two worlds, never fully belonging to one or the other. The subject matter that I have been exploring is my attempt to reclaim a place lost to me, but forever in me. I have found watercolors to be the most appropriate medium for this series. Working with pigments suspended in water has an affinity to my life's experiences. Not always under my control, watercolors allow me to cherish accidents, attempt control, find balance, pursue an infinite possibility of colors and share my vision in layers of memories and accidents of freedom.
In lieu of a statement ... the words that follow speak of my themes.
Entrada

Twisting in yellow light

Chasing the sounds

of an old son

Traveling the chambers of a seashell

to burst free

into liquid blue and green

What took me back

to a place forgotten

  • inside of me?
  • outside of me?

A child submerged in what

no longer is

To be carried away

Awakened by sights

I can no longer see
For Carmen
Platano trees and vines bend

My abuela's front porch to their will

And haunt the columns.

Overgrown like my insides have been

Throwing shadows, fecund destruction

Of the life we fled

Of the life we built

Found on forgetting

...

Here in new Cuba, I am still fourteen

And still fifty. I am still new.

I am again the girl in me.