The story I tell with my recent monotypes is both intimate and political. I grew up in Colorado, in the high plains desert of the American Southwest, where family road trips from Denver in any direction took us out to vast areas of farmland, mesas, deserts and ghost towns populated with skeletal relics of the oil industry.

I use the monotype medium because it combines the fluidity of oil paint with the capacity to build complex compositions using ghosted imagery from earlier layers. I choose a limited palette to place emphasis squarely on the imagery and not on the use of color; the ghostly layering and muted palette give my pieces the character of fading memory.

I experienced the southwest as an essentially male place, one that suggested vast possibilities but was also remote, desolate and difficult. The southwest seems to embody elements that make up the political and economic foundation of America—oil based industries, roads, autos, farms, and gas stations. This very masculine foundation provides for only certain experiences—dry, physical, mechanical, solution-oriented ones­—yet, paradoxically, these locations are filled with nostalgia for the idealism of another time. In this setting, the female form—to me, a fertile icon full of tenderness and generosity—seems lovely, longing, unquenched, nurturing, and sensual. I’ve juxtaposed the female form against these desolate locales to capture the tension between them. Together, they produce a moody, cinematic narrative of contrasts that expresses my complex feelings about my country and myself, the past and the present, the values that I embrace.

Lynn Brofsky