NAME: Todd Monaghan
BIRTH PLACE: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
BIOGRAPHY
painting... collaging ... art...
explored in a tangible textural medium...
explores the breath of intuitive insight
released physically, channeled spontaneously...
expression free of assumptions and expectations...
I arrived in New York City New Years 1987 and took one of my first jobs as an assistant at an antique toy store in Soho. The store had one of the first color copiers in the area and many of the local artists would bring color slides to make copies of their work. I began to notice the subtle images that existed in the subtext of the work; the image behind the image. I started cutting up the left-over copies and took the images IÃÆââââ¬Å¡Ã¬Ã¢ââ¬Å¾Ã¢d collected and sequenced them, together with my own clipped up photographic sequences, into collages.
I started painting the collages showing the energy I envisioned flowing around, through and under the images. I painted the color and flow of energy, energy vortexes, chakras (energy centers) and spheres that represented the heavenly bodies. This continued until the images in the collages were no longer visible, only the paint.
I approach my work from a mystical / spiritual perspective. While my experience with expressing energy in the painting evolved, I have became more and more interested in intuition. Through my studies of breath awareness in both acting and the martial arts, I began to realize that there was an energy that existed outside the five senses that guided the five senses. This energy is what I want my paintings and collages to tap into so as to create an exciting distillation of our political, spiritual and out-of-control pop culture colliding in the 21st Century. This is an ever-evolving process.
tm
