An Interview with Luisa Montoya
Montoya lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work has helped to greatly revamp the discussion around landscape painting
A learned art historian, Luisa Montoya incorporates her multicultural upbringing with a deep relationship to drawing and painting as a mechanism to communicate with the world. We spoke of Art Historical canon, and of woman’s role as the anonymous contributor throughout history. We discussed how her work has focused almost exclusively on landscape, and how that translates to her experience with time, change, and life itself.
Snow Bank, 2022 oil on linen, 40 x 30 cm
“I’m American and Colombian, which are two cultures that I have found to be pretty incompatible. The cold..er New England culture versus the tropical warm culture in Colombia.. You get it”.
“ Uno tiene que vivir con sus contradicciones ”.
(You have to live with your own contradictions)
Can you share a bit about yourself? Where did you grow up, and when did you first connect with art?
I’m a Colombo-American artist, I live in Bogota, but I studied in the U.S. I have family in Rhode Island and Bogota. Art and I go way back, my sister and I used to obsessively make things. One week it would be paper cranes, and there would be dozens of paper cranes all over the house, the next week it would be bracelets… however I never considered it full time until college where I was studying Art History, and had a few studio classes, where I was able to hone my craft.
“ Landscape painting in its historical denomination… has always been male dominated. It’s a very interesting space that I like to occupy with my work ”.
Dogwood, 2022, oil on wood panel, 23 x 31 cm
Has your work always taken on the style it currently embodies?
I have always been interested in different things, where I have seen a connecting factor is my interest in how things change over time. So more recently I’m interested in landscape which is a very vast genre but it’s also a big part of the canon of art history.
However, I think landscape in its historical denomination, especially when we talk about 18th and 19th century painting, is something that is incredibly masculine. Knowing that, to me it’s a very interesting space to occupy with my work.
As a woman, painting a landscape can be seen as the anti-academic pursuit. It’s an interesting exercise for me to see what I come up with, and how that shakes the canon of the female stereotype in this space.
Do you want to speak more about the landscape drawings you made for your most recent participation in New York’s Concordia Studio’s group exhibition 05:59?
That was a very intimate project I worked on, charcoal over paper. I was drawing my friend’s plant that I was taking care of for a friend. Don’t ever entrust me with a plant, I do not have a green thumb at all. But those plants made an environment for me that kept me going last year.
“ It was an interesting exercise to resurface paintings I had made in 2018. It felt like a full circle moment, making a deeper reference to my work with time ”.
What is your process like? How do you begin a piece?
Usually, I start with drawing, drawing has always occupied a huge piece of my life in general, it's the way I think, usually. I have a pretty rigorous sketching schedule, I sketch daily for about an hour or two. Then I look over them and take some to be more resolved drawings, and the drawings I like graduate into paintings. I usually don’t ever paint on the fly. I generally work from life. But recently I’ve been working with family archives and archival images, which is something I have been looking at for my next body of work.
Reflejo (Reflection), 2022, Oil on linen,130 x150 cm
Given you have a very classical approach, how would you say your approach is to your artwork between the subject matters that you portray?
I do have a very traditional workflow, but I also surround myself with archival references, and everyday occurrences like conversations I have that I remember. I start finding all these coincidences within the canon of art history. Since it’s so ingrained in me, I am able to easily reference art historical styles that happen almost by coincidence. That’s my mission as a painter. To have the viewer encounter a painting and not necessarily an image. That is secondary to me. I’m simply the translator.
Does your work reference any Art Historical movements?
I’d like to be more intentional with my references. So far, I have been very indirect and raw with how I relate the references I make. Especially being in that space myself as a person who participates in this environment, and who has an understanding of the history and everything that came with it that is perhaps unsaid, I know my work could be seen as referencing a particular artist or movement, but since I don’t study them as a direct approach to my work, I refrain from mentioning any names that would only be visual references.
