Works

Monica Martin’s artistic output is wide and varied: besides watercolors, engravings, paintings and silk-screenings dedicated to the beloved city of Venice, her repertoire includes a large number of other works of art, such as paintings, engravings and ceramics, which stem from the most intimate side of her personality.

Monica Martin and Venice

On the website www.itacaartstudio.com the artist presents a wide selection of reproductions of her works as well as some original silkscreen prints in which she interprets her city with a very personal approach, in order to release it from the aura of decadence that is usually conferred to it.
As a result, Monica Martin portrays Venice sometimes as lively and jovial, some other times as romantic and dreamlike, without ever depriving it of its uniqueness.

Many of the landscapes representing canals, bridges and banks – as well as views on squares and alleys – are enriched with details which reveal that Venice is populated and therefore alive: one can spot hung laundry, flower pots, lit windows and balconies, TV aerials, sunshade blinds on the typical windows with three lights..
The characters that can be seen in some of the pictures are faithful to the imagery traditionally related to the city. In particular, the artist likes to include solitary gondoliers slowly crossing the canals on their gondola, and cats that animate alleyways and squares, otherwise deserted.
Because in Monica Martin’s works the unquestionable protagonist is Venice itself, with its views and its monuments, even when it is barely suggested as in the monochromatic works or in the night scenes. In these instances, the profile of the city is outlined through different shades of colors, and the blank areas become elements of the landscape, like sky, water, light of windows, street lamps, and moon.

Another subject that really characterizes the artist’s work is her typical abstract gondolas, that she proposes in various versions using a wide range of colors and trying her fantasy to find always new interesting color matches. Here the gondola is the protagonist, in a pure and essential shape, rich in hues and reflections that she creates in the lagoon’s water.

Monica Martin loves Venice and her love for this unique and enchanting town is revealed in all
of her works. The eye of the observer cannot but feel involved and fascinated..

Monica Martin and the personal research

Vital energy and expressiveness of colour and sign come forcibly out of Monica Martin’s works of art.
The bodies and the figures – created through strong and vibrant brush-strokes – move in atmospheres that close in upon them and complete them, keeping the energy alive in the entire work.
Color, a grand protagonist, contributes to the expressive power of the compositions; it manages to shape and communicate feelings and moods: harmony, pleasure, loneliness, sorrow…
In Monica Martin’s works the female figure is source of great inspiration. The artist portraits the female body in infinite variations and new contexts, studying its intrinsic expressive value to let it emerge.
In her ceramic objects the woman becomes an archaic figure, at times simply sketched in her essential outline, but always charged with her atavistic and eternal charm: woman-wineskin, woman-procreating womb…
Nature is another important element in the personal and artistic sphere of Monica Martin, and in her works it becomes a rich and aware environment to which the artist turns to ask for protection and to evoke its transcendent and immutable beauty. The trees become a metaphor for life: sometimes luxuriant, some other times bare and dry, they contain the essence of existence itself, as well as strength, frailty, vitality and quiet.

Finally, the abstract compositions arise from a natural sensibility of the artist, who tends to remove all superfluous in order to enhance the vital, and from an utter and precise will to move and feel moved, taking possession of the rich and fertile vibrations of sign and colour and offering them to the observer.