Todd Monaghan

Born in Delaware in 1964. Todd is a graduate of Emory University. In 1987 he hightailed it to NYC to become a filmmaker. Todd settled on the upper upper Westside of Manhattan where he was mentored by RISD painter Gregory Ilich, who was a production assistant on his short film, The Illumination.

“My work is about finding; really, what I do, is see what exists in the accidental or random, finding inspiration in the dance and celebration of the practice. This is my making process.”

~ Todd Monaghan

Todd Monaghan is an unusual presence on today’s teeming artscape. The coming together of abstraction and figuration has been a central element in much recent artmaking and usually a highly visible one, that being their point, and Monaghan is making such work, but in a wholly different manner. He uses collage for instance, but not to bring reality into abstraction, as did the Cubists, nor to create jarring conjunctions Surrealist manner. Sometimes, as with his Frank Sinatra, collaged images make their presence felt, but as a contribution to the composition, not as a Daliesque finger in the viewer’s eye. And he likes working upon found objects, paintings, for instance, such as The Last Supper which some foolhardy soul had dumped onto the street.

Several artists have channeled pareidolia, namely the tendency of the human eye to discover faces or animal forms in any congregation of objects or abstract shapes. So indeed does Monaghan, but absolutely not because he wants such faces or animal forms to be readily spotted by the viewer of his art. He is similarly given to drawing upon the venerable human catalogue of symbolic forms – the eye, the halo – without making these referenceπs overt. Monaghan in short channels such workings of the eye and brain to energize the viewer’s experience of his art.

And it works. Monaghan's' pieces can be wildly dissimilar. His oeuvre includes many pure abstractions, such as round paint-speckled canvases, but also standing oblongs of white-painted wood sculptures upon which he will identify the black-painted shapes as lips. Likewise a found photograph upon which he has daubed thumb-sized blobs of white pigment and a gold canvas upon which he has collaged an Asian goddess. But all of it is absolutely unmistakeably the work of Todd Monaghan.

~ Anthony Haden Guest, 2024 (art writer)