Monkey Painter
- Non-Fiction
- 256 pages, 7×10 inches
- Price: $28 CAD · $28 USD
- ISBN: 9781554202201
- Date published: 2025-04-10
- Availability: not yet published
Purchase This Title
About Monkey Painter
Monkey Painter is a story-in-pictures that follows the evolution of the artist as she progresses from art student, to teacher, to fully functioning artist over a span of thirty years. Written in the mode of a coming-of-age-novel, the artist describes her trajectory as a young person moving through the institutions and social settings of art: the art school classroom, artist run centres, art museums and galleries, as they existed in Canada at the end of the 20th century.
Moving chronologically, she paces through a series of artistic modes–abstraction, portraiture, photography, landscape, the figure, and finally the end game of monochrome painting–as she attempts to adapt to a fickle and competitive art world, along the way articulating the fraught position of women within it.
Monkey Painter is a memoir; the artist’s own ‘ballad of a failed painter’ – or rather, of how painting failed the artist, forcing her re-evaluate her practice one final time, and move on.