I was speaking with the writer and critic Nancy Princenthal who after seeing your Galerie Buchholz show, which she found fascinating, wondered to me “whether sentimentality, and nostalgia, can be radical-Monica’s work makes it seem so a hard thing to pull off.” I agree. LW That’s interesting, though in my mind you made a choice to walk away from Mokuhanga because of real and practical considerations and smartly turned to a similar but revised technique and made something current and radical with it. I felt the complexity of directly engaging with Japanese culture as a generating source, as European artists had done in the nineteenth century, more troubling in the twenty first! Referring to Mokuhanga by way of US artists and through an American form diminished my larger discomfort with cultural tourism. I went to Japan in 2014 to study Japanese woodcut only to learn that in Japan the carver and the printer are two artists, and it’s believed to take ten years to master each form! So I turned to a technique called white-line woodcut, developed in Provincetown in the early twentieth century by mostly female printmakers influenced by Ukiyo-e printmaking, but more direct in practice. MM Your question about Japanese woodcut is also accurate. They do indeed document a very particular period in time of innocent pleasures. In Bruce Hainley’s press release for your Galerie Buchholz show, he referred to your works as history paintings. I credit my mother for creating a Paris home that allowed for a continual immersion in French culture, which has validated my sense that historical painting has contemporary relevance in that it continues to move, to affect. A coolness or distance that occurs with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres informed my early development and has stayed with me. Part of my reason for incorporating her sensibility so strongly in this body of work about loss is related to the challenges of the past two years as her health has been in decline.Įuropean, particularly French painting, has had a deep impact on my work in establishing some fundamental understanding of idealization and classicism in concert with expression and a liberty taken with form. One of the qualities these works share with her painting is in the lightness of feeling, especially in the past thirty-five years since she began living in Paris for half of every year. I am highly aware of the connection and indebtedness to her engagement with Henri Matisse and pattern. Monica Majoli Leslie! I’m moved that you recognize the relationship of the “blueboys” to my mother’s work. Were you channeling any of that when you began this project? Besides the comparison to your mother’s painting (Pauline Khuri Majoli was my mother’s high school friend and my first painting teacher), I see a direct link to Japanese watercolor block printing, specifically Mokuhanga, developed in nineteenth-century Japan to make Ukiyo-e and Shunga prints. So let’s start by talking about the work Blueboys (2016–19), which was featured in it. Leslie Wayne Monica, it’s wonderful to reconnect with you following your show at Galerie Buchholz in 2019. The show, postponed for over a year due to COVID, finally opened to the public. 2020: a version at both the Hammer Museum in Westwood and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Her debut novel, Brick Lane, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and described by James Wood as ‘a great achievement of the subtlest storytelling’. She was a Bridport Prize judge in 2018.What does it mean to have a body? Not just a vessel of organs and bones, but a living organism that represents all of one’s vulnerabilities-psychological, intellectual, emotional, and sexual? I thought a lot about this question as I prepared myself for an interview with Monica Majoli on the occasion of her inclusion in Made in L.A. Monica Ali is an award-winning, bestselling writer whose work has been translated into 26 languages. The characters might face difficulties but the way in which they deal with those difficulties might just elicit a joyous sense of life! More about Monica Ali Evoking joy in the reader doesn’t necessarily mean writing a ‘happy’ story. Think about the tone and the atmosphere of the story, rather than relying on the ‘events’ – if a character dies, for instance, the reader doesn’t automatically feel sad, unless you first make them care about the character. So – the challenge is to write a story that evokes in the reader either a sense of sadness, or – more difficult – a sense of joy. Yet so often as writers we can lose sight of that as we wrestle with so many aspects of the story and the craft. The stories we love best, the ones that stay with us, evoke emotion.
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