Qcc Artist Directory

Monique Parker

With deep emotion, I try to capture sacred images found within various pantheons of spirituality.

Gallery

About the Art

The sacred images with which Monique began her artistic career were acrylics on canvas. She has moved on to include paintings on wood, mixed media, and works in cold wax and oil. The latter were inspired by the Director of the Tubac Museum of Art in Arizona, where she visited and attended workshops in this exciting new medium. She finds the layers of pigment, transparency and marking that cold wax produces to be evocative of the layers of our own human experience.

Monique still works with acrylics, finding this quick-drying medium with its vivid colors a great way to capture images of the Southwest. She has begun to explore landscapes done in oil paints using a variety of palette knives. Her cold wax images do not involve brushes at all, but a wide variety of marking tools such as a brayer, palette, dental tools, spatulas, etc. to create and excavate many layers. She prefers a monkish existence of solitude and silence when she creates.

Bio

Born in East Los Angeles, Monique grew up in San Jose. Monique has an MFA in Creative Writing, a BA in Mass Communications, and advanced teaching certifications in Vedic chanting and yoga therapy. She has worked as a graphic designer, copywriter, editor, marketing communications consultant, professor of English Composition and Creative Writing, She walked away from a lucrative career in Silicon Valley in 2001 to relocate to the Questa area.

For the past twenty years, Monique has dedicated herself to teaching, writing, spiritual studies. When Covid closed her yoga studio, she returned to an early love for painting. Her paintings are inspired by her many immersive pilgrimages to India and holy symbolism, as well as living rurally in Northern New Mexico with its rugged landscape and shifting light. During Covid, Monique started painting as an extension of her sādhanā or spiritual path. Over seven weeks, she painted daily, producing twenty-one acrylic paintings, and finished the series during Navaratri, the nine nights of Goddess Durga.

Her paintings represent a deep love of the Divine. It’s with deep emotion that she captures sacred images found within various pantheons of spirituality.

Her paintings have been shown in the following exhibitions: Art Moziak Santa Fe, Harwood Museum of Art, Taos Center for the Arts, Taos Fall Arts Festival, Questa Studio Arts Tour, Millicent Rogers Annual Miniature Show, New Mexico Art League’s Small Works Holiday Show, Colorium Online International Exhibit, San Fernando Valley Arts and Cultural Center, Las Laguna Gallery in Laguna Beach, CA, The Studio Door in San Diego, CA, KBM Art Gallery in Riverside, CA, Tubac Center for the Arts in Tubac, AZ, and the Taos Abstract Artists Collective.