Stormy Monday True Renaissance Man...
Every time Stormy Monday paints a picture, he begins a journey. He says it starts when he “walks into the canvas.” Sometimes the journey lasts only hours, sometimes days or weeks. Sometimes he loses all track of time, but when he does come back, he has created a finished work – a spiritual vision of how he sees the world.
A self-taught artist, poet, and performer, Monday and his wife Raina have traveled to cities all over the western United States to show and sell his paintings, self-published books, CDs and poetry. His paintings and other works have been displayed in many fine art galleries including the Scottsdale, Arizona, gallery of renowned marine muralist Wyland. Monday's art transfers to paper as well as canvas. And he has achieved recognition for his poetry as a recipient of the Distinguished Poet Award, the Dickinson Award of Amherst, and the National Golden Poet Award.
Monday, who moved his family to East Peoria from Colorado Springs several years ago, paints in several diverse styles. Put his typical show inventory of 100 paintings together in one gallery room and no one believes that one artist created them all. His impressionistic visionscapes painted in oils are vast, warm, and adorned with forms and faces of spirits both seen and unseen. His watercolor and acrylic abstracts explode with color and intrigue and can be impressionistic, cubist, or surreal. Made from oils, acrylics, chalk, duct tape, or whatever else he feels might work, Monday's multimedia, three- dimensional abstracts are also colorful but can seem mysterious and turbulent.
All Monday's styles are painted to New Age jazz music, which he says provides him with certain energies. He believes everything comes from within. His diverse artistic talents link with his ability to see what is inside his soul. Nothing is planned. "I don't have the discipline that a student of fine arts would have," Monday says. "I don't sketch or outline before I paint. I turn the energy inside me into paint and canvas. When I am serene and at peace and in harmony with the universe, it's a visionscape. When I feel chaotic, it's an abstract. And if I throw the canvas on the floor, it's definitely a three- dimensional abstract. As far as I'm concerned, there are no rules.
