A Lucky Life
by Bascha Mon
This is me as a serious little girl. I am wearing my burgundy velvet dress and a tiny Jewish star necklace. Both were gifts from my Aunt Fanny who was my Fathers sister. She lived in the Bronx on Albemarle Road and was a great Jewish cook. As soon as we got off the elevator on her floor delicious aromas wafted to my nose and I would run down the hall to nestle into her bosomy chest. I knew that yummy foods were going to be served. My mom, who worked day and night in my parents store in Newark, NJ, didn’t have time to do much cooking. A trip to the Bronx was always a huge treat. She had three children but they were all grownup. Most of my cousins were old enough to be my parents. You are probably getting the idea that as the young kid, I was pampered and spoiled. I am told I was quite a brat. This photo, taken I think in a professional studio, was one of two wearing this favorite dress. I loved having my braids taken out, and my long hair brushed. This was not the everyday me, who was a tomboy in braids with scabs on both knees, who preferred playing with the boys. I had only two dolls. One was a Shirley Temple doll with blonde curls and a fancy dress. She was no fun to play with anyway. The other I think was made of rubber and could be undressed and washed: what I thought was fun. I never had a dollhouse but loved crayons and coloring books, very popular in the 1930s. Well, I didn’t know that I was going to say all this but memories are pouring over me as I write. Those of you who know my art and me are aware of how important memories and all that is locked in my unconscious are to my art making. The other day I looked up at my bedroom wall and decided that I could reach this frame, take it down and photograph it. I have often posted the other larger one of me in the velvet dress because I look prettier in the other photo. But I got to thinking of how this little girl, so quiet and serious of demeanor, still lives inside nearly 90 years old me now. It’s this little girl, more than the tomboy, who became an avid reader. She taught herself to read when she was four and devoured books with the same eagerness as she ate her Aunt Fanny’s food.
This is the little girl who dreamed of far away places and never guessed what real life would be. It’s been a very long time since that photo. I have learned that life is hard but has wonderful moments. My life has not at all been the same as that dreamy little girl imagined or hoped it would be - life seldom is. But looking back and then forward I would say that I had a lucky life. I have accumulated more memories than I could paint even if I live many more years. And that is the main point here. I had never dreamed of art or ever knew anyone who was a real full-time artist. Yet how could my life have been better when I have been allowed to make whatever I wanted each day that I went to the studio? No one dictated requirements. I could spend my days as happily as a child doing what I love best of all. If that’s not a lucky life than I don’t know what is.
Ms. Mon has recently been working in encaustics and digitally manipulated collage prints. Previous work includes installations and sculpture.
Bascha Mon
Statement
My art is a confluence of received images from direct experience – friendship, home, children, nature, travel, world events, personal relationships – and working in the studio, alone. Ideas are elicited through the images of my everyday life and those seen in the daily news, then filtered through my artistic imagination into paint, sculpture and installation. I do not create art to portray my political concerns, but my political concerns find a way through, even in abstraction. My work is always a blend of lavish color with abundant emotional content and a subtle narrative quality that relates the imagery to our shared realities. The paintings are expressive and color-based, a complicated blend of abstraction and representation where abstraction serves to represent strong emotion, memory and aspiration, and representation serves as a method of storytelling connecting the image to the viewer. Each painting unfolds as I work varying in style and emotional subtext as my imagination, psychological state and the studio environment dictates. In the past two and a half years painting the New Land series my process has been inextricably connected to the mystical music of Olivier Messiaen. In particular, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus, performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Messiaen had synesthesia and I’m not sure how that has linked to my subconscious, but the images and colors seem to appear partially in response to the rhythms and swells of this music which plays continuously while I work each day. There have been times when I started out with an image that I have seen in the regular course of my day and the music was playing as I worked, but most of the time, with no initial image in mind, I stand with my hands over the paper until I feel something coming through the music.
New Land Series 2022
NEW LAND is a series of 288 paintings, small works mostly of gouache on paper, that give voice to the aspirations and anticipations of humans and exodus. - Bascha Mon
New York Times Review
“THE sculptures of Bascha Mon are energized by opposition. Ms. Mon puts disparate objects together in ways that are at once audacious and subtle, sophisticated and ingenuous, compulsive and calculated. Made of both found and created objects, they are repositories of memories: Ms. Mon's personal fixed memories, often potently intersecting with the collective memory.” - By William Zimmer June 7, 1998
Bascha Mon in her studio.
Bascha Mon was born Nov. 3 1932 in Newark, NJ.
Bascha Mon, Copyright 2022 - All Rights Reserved.
PROMPT #1: Reflect on a transitional moment in your own life. Contemplate the work of Bascha Mon and how she uses memory, found and created objects as repositories of those memories. Create an object, painting or other form that reflects and speaks to your own personal memory.
PROMPT #2: Create a journal of Personal Memory. Commit to adding a double page spread every day using simple materials (oil pastels, watercolor, pen and ink, pencil) Start with your earliest memory.