About the work
“Moni and the Sphynx is a mythologized portrait of one of my life's most central collaborators and muses, fellow artist Monica Canilao. Wisdom, boundaries, the fecundity and ferocity of nature are all being thought out within the forms in her dress. She's emerging from, or is balanced on, a series of eggs and earths, rooting trees and river beds. There's a sense of lightning coming from her fingers, which I let emerge organically out of the drawing because Monica is someone whose creativity seems to flow from her fingertips as naturally as spider's silk and as spontaneously as lightning. She's balanced in the center of all this with the equanimity of a creator who's comfortable using these forces as fuel. For me, her look is somewhere between a challenge, perhaps to take the world in as fully as she does, and a promise, that she will hold the center, and the very solidity of that holding will let us explore some of our own wilderness.”
Each is hand-painted with acrylic gouache and watercolors by the artist. 15 color silkscreen in bright colors by Swoon.
Numbered 36/75
