Mona Lisa - Private. Do not read.

ML - Welcome to Mona Lisa. A weekly newsletter for artists with timeless quotes, ideas and light bites for curious & wandering minds.

Lite Bites

🗑️ The ‘rubbish’ art of a busker home.

🍌 That banana sold for $6.2m last week…and dude just ate it.

💕 “The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.” - Nat King Cole

Mona’s notes

I begin most days by writing in my journal. It is my therapist, external server, and a right pain in the a$$ 😅. I remember my first diary at age 16. It had this silly little lock on it that came with a key which I lost a full 20 minutes after I got it. The lock promoted the ridiculous idea that no one would ever be able to read my diary, when in fact it just became a beacon for the nosy 🔐👀 

Tracey Emin has spoken of her reluctance to keep journals. Instead, she sketches, fearing the intimacy of written words falling into the public gaze. It’s a tension between the journal as a deeply private refuge versus its potential as a public artefact. 🗞️

Sylvia Plath’s journals, published posthumously by Ted Hughes, are such a maddening joy to read. They offer an unparalleled insight into her brilliance and struggles but also troubled me as they raised the ethical question: should journals, intended as private, be shared with the world? Whilst they preserve the artist’s unfiltered self, they may later be seen as a legacy document 💌.

Artists throughout history have used journaling as a means of documenting their inner worlds. Frida Kahlo’s Diary, a riot of colors and fragmented thoughts, provides an intimate glimpse into her pain and imagination. Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo are a testament to how writing deepened his understanding of his art, blending descriptions of his paintings with reflections on his emotional and spiritual state. Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, meanwhile, are a marvel of human curiosity, chaotically and brilliantly mixing sketches, scientific observations, and musings that spanned disciplines. 📖 

Journals can provide a rare and unfiltered portal into a person’s mind, but this is the romanticized benefit that the reader derives. What about the writer? The “artist’s pages,” popularized by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, invites creatives to treat journaling as a ritualistic daily cleansing of the mind’s clutter. Cameron argues these pages can unlock hidden ideas and emotions, sparking creative breakthroughs💡. 

For me, it’s less about breakthroughs and beautiful writing. It’s simply a compulsive need. After a particularly sticky year, I revisited my journal entries over that period and they shed fresh light on how I had arrived at certain decisions and outcomes 🤯. I could spot patterns in retrospect—something that I find so fascinating because it’s when I can literally see my subconscious in action.

My main issue with journaling is that I tend to fall into the habit of writing for an audience 🙈. It can then become a proper bore to write because no one wants to journal like they’re gunning for a Pulitzer—that doesn’t sound chill guys. It takes a while to park this feeling and to write like no one’s watching 😈. It’s a muscle, and one that is pretty difficult to flex. Is it symptomatic of our world today where we live under the gaze of an audience? I also always handwrite because language and thought flow so differently when you can’t hit backspace every three seconds or edit with such ease. You are forced into authenticity🖊️.

Try it. Three minutes a day. Write about anything—from the dinner you had last night to the fact that you don’t know what to write but are still writing this sentence, and thus it is now something ♾️. It’s the act that matters, not the content 😌 .

With love

Mona x

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange” — Vincent Van Gogh

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