Mona Grønstad
The works from the series ”Between the lines” are inspired by the ancient architecture of Havana, Cuba. The colonnades are forming delicate lines of light and shades. The lines are also used for building up the structure of the painting. People are part of the picture as well; Crowds of people where the figures melt into one another.
“I’m an observer. Fragments of movement, light and shadows stick to the memory like traces of something I have seen. This is the basis of the paintings, says Mona.
All paintings are in the water-colour technique. The formats vary from 50x70 cm to 70x100 cm.
Text: Øivind Brune
Mona Grønstad started working with watercolours in 1999, and in a short time she has developed the technique to perfection. She combines different styles: She is working wet-in-wet, where she uses a spray bottle to put a veil of water drops on the paper, before she adds the colours, creating a lace-like pattern. When the colours are nearly dry, she’s spraying on more water, so that the colours “bleed”. At some parts she sucks up the colour, thus creating lighter parts. She is working with transparent, lazur-like layers. At some spots she is using tape, to achieve sharp parts in contrast with the more “floating” areas.
“The paintings need some “developing-time”, she says. “A lot happens during the drying period, from the colours are put on until the sheet is dry. During this time the picture is being created. There is a short distance between happiness and disaster. But that’s the fascinating thing about it”.
Mona is working figuratively. Some of the details are almost photorealistic, while other parts are just big areas of light and shadows. Some paintings, or parts of the paintings, are monochrome, while others have woofs of strong, glowing colours. Mona prefers to work with motives in series. For example she has painted series with a barn, that she called Noah’s ark, and a series with lighthouses. Her two most recent series contains motives from Havana, that she has called “Between the lines”, plus a series with motives from Telemarkskanalen, Norway.
The pictures from Havana are dominated by colonnades and people living their lives between them. But the people are likely to be put in the middle ground or the background. The pillars can give associations to the classical culture tradition, colonial times and the past. They represent something stable, everlasting, with nostalgic undertones. The people are in motion; in activity, but still representing something transient. The people are often luminous, as if they are overexposed or due to vanish in a flash of light. They are seen at a distance and all the sounds can’t be heard. It looks like the artist, or we, have come unsuspecting into a situation that we don’t quite understand, viewing it from a safe distance.
We sense an enigmatic quietness like in the works of the metaphysical painter De Chirico.
“I think of them as fragments of something I’ve seen, Mona says. “A sort a remembrance of something that existed for a second before it disappeared in the memory.”
In the series from Telemarkskanalen, the boats and the sluices are the central motives. The boat is floating through the landscape and the sluices are carrying it against the stream. It is dark, late in the evening or at night. People are swarming on the deck, heavily illuminated so that their contours are erased. The travellers represent the community, and may be joy, expectation, like something out of a fairy-tale. But still we sense a stream of eeriness. The boat has been used as symbol in many cultures. It can be a symbol of the mans travel through the life, or the travel after the death, to the other side, as for example the travel with ferryman Carons boat to the underworld over the river Styx. But also in these pictures there is a mysterious stillness.