Movements in Energy - The Painting of Monika Humm

Cornelia Kleÿboldt M.A. (translated by John-Patrick Daly)

... When the artist paints, it is as if she is participating in a flow of energy, where the force of its current represents also the force of the pictures. It is as if she becomes an inseparable component of the motion, that is expressed as an image within the structure of the horizontal and vertical lines in her paintings.

It is as if the artist prepares herself for this immersion in the flow, through the choice of her space and canvas formats, with her range of colours, with the choice of liquid and solid painting materials, with broad and narrow brushstrokes.

Glowing fire colours contrasting with darker tones, the blackness of night or earthy hues, the colour radiating with an unreal clear white.

Horizontal lines are laid on top of each other in the image space, pressed together, stacked and consolidated. They are arranged again and again in a "grid", a more or less continuous framework, underlain by verticals, painted over or interspersed (...)

The paintings of Monika Humm are in principal only a detailed extract of a larger limitless structure. Her choice of painting ground, and the visual rationale, permits a highly effective surface interception. Her canvas is the lectern from which she delivers the manifesto of a life's experience. Her actions will always equate with the result.

Her paintings reach for, and bear a resemblance of, impressions of urban and rural idyls, up and on to autonomous, pictorial distortions. Between the cityscape of New York, the open space of the West, and further on to mountain ranges; an ever shifting view of landscapes in depth and motion. They are a reminder of Monet without the water lilies, or a narrative free Manet. They continue on in the viewer as a pulsating, multi-toned configuration of soundless music, or they act as a calligraphy existing without text. Again and again, they recollect the means and possibilities inherent in the art of non-representational painting. It is, what it is. Monika Humm is an artist with both an energetic and innovative approach, rapidly arriving at the very nerve centre of her painting ...

November 2008