Drawing inspiration from her childhood experience in a rural area of Queensland and Édouard Vuillard’s ‘Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist‘ painting, Monica Rohan creates fascinating and whimsical pictures full of patterns that feature energetic children adventures.
My dad’s a dairy farmer so I grew up on a property in the Kerry Valley in the Gold Coast hinterlands. I spent a lot of my childhood and teens just wandering around the hills, having free rein there. My parents let me go to art lessons, and I was always pretty focused. I could spend hours and hours drawing all the time. I was also the youngest; my siblings are quite older than me so I had a lot of time left to my own devices. (…) Particularly one painting [has influenced], Édouard Vuillard’s ‘Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist’, 1893. In the work, there are two figures, especially the sister who is standing and stooping and blending into the wallpaper. There is this really intense pattern behind her, I think that was a pretty major revelation to me. As well as that, Amy Cutler, an American artist, has also done weird figures with patterns.
Monica Rohan
More info: Instagram (h/t: Artist Profile Magazine).