Mona Lisa - Throw roses

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

Send a friend some Mona-mail this year 💌 

If you are enjoying my weekly musings and mutterings, I would be very grateful if you could please share the joy with your fellow artists and creatives.

My hope for this newsletter is to keep it meaningful, short, full of random facts, honey and spice. (Also importantly I want to make a cute t-shirt for you guys as my day ones.)

I love a meaningful referral from my friends - song, discount code or a book - I guess it shows that someone thought about me 🥰.

Lite Bites

🔳 Mondrian didn’t start painting his famous grids until his 40’s.

⏬️ “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” - James Clear.

🗂️ A survey by Arts Council England found that 65% of artists struggle to balance time for making art with administrative tasks.

🎨 Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime.

Mona’s notes

It’s a tender time of year, so I’ll keep this short and weird to break up the usual tone of New Year content…✨

Twixmas (yes, it’s a word) was spent in solitude, so I used this time to do some life streamlining and to eat everything in sight. I did something bizarre: I collated all my rejection emails from 2024, sat down with a bag of Sainsbury’s onion rings, and read them all (the emails not the onion rings). After about email #5, I began to read them aloud and they sounded increasingly meaningless. What this wild exercise showed me was simply that the emails were all materially the same: the same wording, format, and mechanical tone (I curated a selection of these on the new Mona Lisa Instagram).

Yes, this may sound like I am addicted to pain 👀 but in fact this exercise made me feel so much lighter. I suppose it is because I realised how hard I had worked last year, how relentless and unfazed I could be, and how much I had learned from my attempts. A friend helpfully pointed out that these rejections don’t actually signify any real loss to us, which in retrospect can be quite empowering. I am now ready to throw myself at them all over again (they should be so lucky 😏), knowing that the worst thing they can do is to actually award me that prize, residency, show or grant because it will mean that I will have to commit to something out of my comfort zone, and act.

The reason I bring this up is that my brother recently shared a cute fact about bees that re-framed how I view effort and purpose 🐝:

A bee typically lives for about 6 weeks in summer. In that time, it visits approximately 2,000 flowers and produces just one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. It takes the entire lifetime of 12 bees to make us a single golden teaspoon of honey. For those who spread it on buttered toast or stir it into their chai…imagine how magical it will taste just knowing this? ✨ 

To emphasise: It takes 12 bees to make a single teaspoon of honey…so lean on your fellow artists and creatives this year - it truly takes a village.

Whatever 2025 brings, you got this. Go make that honey💛.

With love —

Mona x

p.s. Next week’s newsletter will be a takeover by my first collaborator of the year…

“With enough butter, anything is good” - Julia Child

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