Some days ago an Indian friend sent me a Facebook video by Mona Caron, an artist creating large-scale paintings on walls (murals). I have seen other kinds of murals but here I was touched by the subtlety of the colours and the playfulness with which she is creating mainly vegetative motives on all kinds of walls.
[In brackets: While looking at the videos of her paintings, my thoughts went back to the mid-70s, to my student times in Münster, Germany:
Together with two friends I lived on a farm, in an old milker lodging. There I could do a few murals, in my amateur style to bring in some poetic ambience: In the entry a big painting of a church window with flowers, in the kitchen a branch of a cherry tree with a poem of Hölderlin, in the sleeping room a big wall painted with gold patterns of water color and in the long dark corridor a big spacy painting glowing in the dark with ultra-violet light… And I decorated the windows of the toilet at a little sideroom with glass painting…]
Mona Caron’s flowers grow on fronts of high-rise buildings, at crossroads or along the streets. Of course, when she is painting flowers, these are not “vertical gardens” bringing the beauty of live flowers but her murals enliven the ambience and stimulate the imagination. She is very creative in the way she brings beauty into the otherwise stony deserts of mega-cities. And her works now embellish walls all around the globe. See here the “Market Street Railway” mural. However, she does not only work outdoor but also does indoor artwork.
Mona Caron is a native of Ticino, in the Italian part of Switzerland. She is the daughter of Swiss theater and opera set designer Peter Bissegger, and now is based in San Francisco. Besides painting she is also active in “art-ivism” with social movements to support different issues like climate justice events.
Read more about Mona Caron on her website.
Painting giant weeds on buildings all around the world: “Weeds”
Outgrowing: “Outgrowing our skyrocketing dangers, reaching for clear skies.. . Healing herbs for an ailing earth, in a 6500 square feet mural in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.”
Manifestation Station – a painted utility box
Picture from the video “Outgrowing” by Mona Caron (c)
