Maria Monks began her journey to becoming a painter and art teacher late in life. As a birthday gift to herself at the age of 50, she started her first drawing class. She was living in a small, beautiful mountain village in New Mexico when the calling that had teased and pulled at her for more than 30 years demanded her focus and attention.
The first steps were modest, but intense. Maria studied drawing and design for two years at a local college, before she began to paint. The impressionism of Claude Monet and JMW Turner became a guide and inspiration for her.
She remembers looking in Artist’s magazine in 1998 and finding and delighting in the work of the gifted Susan Sarback. So, Maria expanded her exploration and discipline, taking trip after trip to California to study with Sarback, whose own teacher was from Monet’s lineage. She studied the methods of Henry Hensche and Charles Hawthorne who, in the early 20th century, had developed unique techniques at the Cape Cod School of Art to make Impressionism teachable.
Her passion for the work continued to expand, and after moving to the Northwest in 2005, Maria studied at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She completed workshops with other fine artists, most notably with talented Canadian artist Heather Keenan, who taught Maria to incorporate lovely, soft oil stick techniques into her growing palette of skills.
Maria’s paintings are now in international collections.
The journey has come full circle for Maria, and aside from her painting, one of her biggest joys now is teaching the methods of Sarback, Hensche and Hawthorne at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, and in the small, private workshops and one on one tutorials she offers.
In teaching, Maria delights in sharing the vision and the techniques of the Impressionists with other burgeoning artists. Her joy is to support and guide her students as they paint the beautiful Northwest landscapes and grow as artists in their own right.
