Mona Lisa - Letting go

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Mona’s notes

A happy surprise — I came across some old artwork that I had made during my school days. My parents had diligently kept a few pieces once I had forgotten about them. It was a really sweet feeling to reconnect with something I had created 25 years ago - so naive, unconstrained, free, fun. Whilst down memory lane, I decided to revisit works I had created only 5 years ago - familiar, still warm. I felt progress, but I also saw something surprising - whispers of these older pieces in my most recent work, seductively suggesting the outline of a creative arc.

My latest body of work feels significant and endogenic to who I am in a way that I haven’t experienced before. And it came about quite suddenly, as if something had forced its way onto the canvas - reading like a brake light to the momentum of what came before it. Now my older body of work seems analogous to an awkward pubic phase, and I feel faced with a decision: do I paint over some of these older works?

Artists and craftspeople seem to have differing opinions. A few say they paint over, melt down, move on. Resources are scarce for me, space precious, and I hate hoarding. Others reassure me that they are important - keep them, they will be important later. In the retrospectives of prominent artists, I especially love works that show radical shifts in aesthetic, material, concept or vision. Two recent shows - Phillip Guston (Tate Modern) and Mark Rothko (Fondation LV) - both walked audiences through compelling and fairly dramatic changes in their artistic directions.

But ok - thinking that my work will be the subject of a retrospective is a wild reason. I am grateful to have this portal to the deep past, courtesy of my parents foresight. However can I justify the same archival reasoning in 2024, when smartphone photography affords us similar access to the past? It’s never going to be the same as a physical body of work, but as with anything in the digital age, the idea of ‘letting go’ is not the same as it once was.

I haven’t made a decision yet, but what’s the rush. I’ll sit with the old paintings, until I conveniently forget about them and they reappear, hopefully when I’m preparing for that retrospective 😏

With love -

Mona x

“creativity loves constraints” - Marissa Mayer

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