I find joy in the act of creation, a certain bliss when the outcome answers a question, fulfills a need, results in a clear visual response to experience and imagination. Quiet scenes pulled from the flux of contemporary life are the starting point for me. Conventional notions of image making are searched for their underlying structures and geometries. The structure and function of our visual experience, of how we feel when we see, holds as much interest for me as how reality appears on the surface.

Space is an active entity. It can interrupt the integrity of form, setting objects into motion in the mind, evoking the dimension and feeling of time. Color, texture and changing light represent the the physical world as a place of transition. Time, space, place are fluid.

For me, art is alchemy. Art is transformation. It is a compelling occupation with precious rewards. Getting to the way I paint was an intuitive process; one intuitive step over a long period of time. I haven’t been searching for a style so much as a way to make sense of what I see, to experience and feel what I see. Here is that journey, unedited, pages from a diary of exploration.

The life and work of Elizabeth Monks Hack springs from a matrix of art, culture and the humanities. She is a painter, pianist, fashion designer, illustrator, cartoonist, art scholar and teacher of art. Yet it is in the art of oil painting that she finds her emotional home. It is the most reliable place where the self and its relation to the outside world, is found.

Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Monks Hack moved to San Diego, California with her Anglo-Italian family, who left large families behind to seek warmer and newer climes. She attended the University of San Diego and graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Studio Art, at a time when Conceptual Art and Minimalism dominated aesthetic discourse. Monks Hack has earned degrees from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Chapman College and CSU Dominquez Hills, where she completed graduate work in the Humanities.

Her education and experience represent the trajectory and variety of her art career. In Los Angeles Monks Hack worked in the fashion industry, both as a clothing manufacturer and an assistant designer, before relocating to the California central coast. Her career as an arts educator began there, where she worked for many years in the Lompoc Unified School District, Allan Hancock College and Brandman University, teaching art to students of all levels. Throughout her career in education she has maintained an exhibition schedule in several central coast art galleries.

Early travels to Europe, the Middle East, India and Nepal, and a year lived in Morocco fed the fires of her creativity as well as her broad interest in the humanities. She continues her global travels to witness first hand the vitalizing art and culture of the world’s peoples. Her career as an educator generated unexpected facets of her career. The teaching of global and ancient art history, along with her travels, led to the creation of a cartoon character named Compass Rose Voyager, featuring an adventurous art scholar who travels the world in pursuit of purloined antiquities. A series of graphic novels and a business, encompassing all her varied passions, evolved from this.

Monks Hack works in a light-filled attic studio in the same cottage where she and her husband Wyn raised their four sons. Monks Hack is currently focused on “Patchwork,” a series of oil paintings on pieced and sewn canvas.