Monica Carroll

How are digital tools and experiences interrupting our experience of landscape? How are they changing the definition of contemporary painting? Those questions initiated the recent painting project I am undertaking.

My work often begins with an experience in nature – a hike, a walk, or a wander through the forest or garden. Bringing photos, sketches, and memories of that experience into the studio, I paint. I often paint on a large scale, bringing human-sized gestures into the work. My studio practice then entails a cycling of the image through digital and analog process – scanning, shooting digital photos, printing in inkjet, layering in photoshop, re-printing, re-scanning, re-painting. Rinse cycle repeat through the digital and the handmade. What begins as a large oil painting morphs into a more intimate mixed media work on paper featuring inkjet, pencil and watercolor on paper. Questions of “real” versus “fake” touch come up; memory of the initial experience fades and a new experience emerges.

I am fascinated by the way painting has survived as a central medium in contemporary art over the past century. As new materials and processes are incorporated into painting practices, painting exhibitions continue to be a strong force. My work is informed by modern painting influences and the struggle to find the ideal role for digital tools in both my experience of landscape and in my painting practice.