ARTIST BIO
Monique Tyacke is an Australian contemporary artist based on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. She studied at Sydney College of the Arts and later spent a number of years living in New York, an experience that continues to influence her interest in colour, architecture, photography and the visual energy of everyday life.
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Tyacke is known for her bold, reductive paintings that combine landscape, memory and imagination. Drawing from her own photography, travel and observations of the world around her, she constructs highly considered compositions using simplified forms and saturated colour. Her work moves between abstraction and representation, often introducing unexpected or playful elements into otherwise recognisable landscapes. Across her ongoing series, Tyacke explores the way places are remembered, altered and reinvented through personal experience.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings begin with the world around me, places I’ve travelled, photographs I’ve taken, landscapes, architecture and the small unexpected details of everyday life. I pull these elements apart and reconstruct them through my own reductive visual language, simplifying form into bold planes of colour and shape. What begins with something real often moves somewhere between memory and imagination, as places, objects and fragments from different moments are brought together to create landscapes that feel familiar, but don’t quite exist.
Colour is central to my work. I use it instinctively and deliberately to create structure, mood, tension, optimism and sometimes a little humour. My paintings are carefully planned and constructed, yet I want the finished works to retain a sense of freedom and possibility. I’m interested in creating worlds that invite the viewer to look a little longer, places where a landscape can hold memory, symbolism and invention all at once, and where the ordinary can become slightly strange, playful and unexpected. I want people to enjoy the subjects I choose as well as their bold colours.
AN INTERVIEW WITH BEACHES COVERED MAGAZINE
2022
Your colourful style is unique, unlike anything I have seen before. How did it develop?
I’ve always been really into graphic art. My style started to develop many, many years ago when I was playing around with my photos on my Mac. These days I have my process down to a fine art. I start each artwork on the computer manipulating my own photographs and I create something that I would want to paint onto the canvas. I then draw the outline onto canvas and use acrylic paint to fill in the colours. I love experimenting with unusual colour combinations and usually work across quite a few paintings at any time. Over the years, my style has stayed the same, but my colours and the scale of my works has changed quite a bit. I really love painting large scale works, my shapes are more fluid and the overall feel is so much grander.
The contradiction of graphic shapes and fluid movement is truly captivating, like a stripped back photograph. How do you achieve this effect?
That is exactly what it is, a stripped back photograph. I like to simplify shapes, tones and colours, and in a lot of the works in the last few years I’ve increased the contrasting colours. I’ve tried to simplify more, so that no matter what my subject matter, the colours in every series all hang really well together.
Your Brookvale light drenched studio is full of laughter and sunshine. How important is your creative space?
For the last 6 years my creativity has exploded due to fact that my studio is now outside my home. Before that, I was painting small, struggling with light at different times of the day and finding excuses to potter around the studio organising and and not painting. There was a lot of distraction and procrastination going on in my small home studio. My current studio and gallery space in Brookvale is the perfect creative space. I share with another painter and we each bring our dogs along most of the time, we open all the doors and windows and we have the music going throughout the day. We randomly chat when we want or need to and we laugh a hell of a lot! It’s such a happy space to paint in and at the end of each day I never want to leave. I think that having my studio away from my home has also made me appreciate it more. I have set painting hours each day, unless I’m on a tight deadline, and try to fit as much into my day as possible.
You have painted your way around the globe. What is it about a scene that makes you grab for your brushes?
Every trip I take, I have my whole camera kit with me, consisting of my DSLR, GoPro and AxisGo underwater iPhone housing. I take thousands of photographs and videos and usually go through them at the end of each day in my hotel room. I choose the ones I like and add to my specific Dropbox folders. The scenes I eventually choose to paint have lots of interesting shapes within them. From the rock walls in The Narrows of Zion National Park, the rugged coastlines of the Hawaiian islands, to the colourful buildings along the Cinque Terre, I find inspiration everywhere. Even the view from the plane window travelling to these far off places from high in the sky gives a different perspective.
I’ve never seen a work space more beautifully ordered and organised than your materials table. How much of your personality is reflected in your work?
That’s so funny, I think my studio is the only place I’m organised. My paint table is a bit OCD, I know where every colour is at any time. It really helps to have them all laid out in colour groups and ready to go. I think I paint the same way. My process and paintings are very ordered from start to finish. Unless I change the colours dramatically as I go, I can usually tell what each painting will end up looking like, even before I’ve started painting.
A piece of art can change the mood of a room. What do you hope your paintings bring to a space?
The current trends in Sydney are quite neutral in peoples homes, everyone seems to want a space that’s calm and looks like something from a design magazine. I love all those neutrals, but I want to walk into a room and see amazing colourful art on the walls, a fantastic sculpture or unusual piece of furniture, a conversation piece, not something that blends into everything else in the room. My paintings are big, bold and colourful, they make you feel good. Each painting brings a sense of fun, joy and vitality of a place imagined or once visited.
How can our readers get their hands on a original Monique Tyacke painting?
You can pop in to view available works in my studio, just knock on the door between 10-2 M-F or by call me to make an appointment any other time. My website has most of my current paintings on it as well. Sneak peaks are often seen on my Instagram and Facebook pages too. Send me a message if something catches your eye.