Monica Cook graduated from SCAD in 1996 with a BA in
painting. She is also trained in art therapy and has been a special education
substitute teacher. She started a mural business about ten years ago, and that
and shows and selling her work makes up her income. She now lives and works in New York.
She is primarily a painter, but
also does photography, drawings and animation. The work though, that connects
to my theme are some of her paintings.
The painting below particularly embodies my theme of the relations
between the grotesque and the sexual. Denoted in this painting are many women’s
legs, feet, hands and bottoms, accompanied by one breast, octopus tentacles,
and messy, slimy food. The women look like they are tangled together, but their
clenching hands and bare bodies elude to a sexual nature. Cook captures the
sheen and texture of the women’s skin covered with food, as well as depicts
their body parts very realistically. I classify this painting as both grotesque
and beautiful. The women are in erotic positions covered in food, which makes
their bodies slippery and sexual.
A quote from a review oh her work is as follows: “Cook’s nude women
engage with gorgeously rendered erotic food in scenes that elicit a range of
emotion in the viewer from mesmerized hilarity to horror…”
I
think Monica Cook very successfully converges beautiful bodies with macabre
slimy food and tentacles in. Seeing her work, I am inspired to explore what
other substances I can use or depict in my work that can go from being
completely every day life objects, to overtly erotic.
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