Modern Mona Lisa Painting by Martina Rall

Art Description

Painting: Photo, Paint and Manipulated on Canvas and Wood.

Overpainted Mixed Media Collage
Acrylic Colors, Pastels & Artificial Resin on Fine Art Canvas Print
© 2016 Martina Rall. All rights reserved.

Since a couple of weeks I am working on a Niki de Saint Phalle self-portrait for my icon portrait series. I admire the woman and the artist in her. To me and to my artistic work she is one of the most inspiring women artists of the 20th century. I could create dozens of Niki de Saint Phalle self-portraits. This artistic incarnation has become a real obsession to me. Niki is sharing my days and my nights. Artwork and daily life merge into one. What's in my mind is blended with how I feel and what I see around me.
"Modern Mona Lisa" has been my first New Media Niki de Saint Phalle Self-Portrait. I named her Mona Lisa because of the mystical smile. Something secret and mysterious goes along with this Self-Portrait, I can't explain. That is why it fascinates me again and again.

This painting is part of my series "Being Marilyn Monroe. Icon Portraits.", a series of self-portraits reflecting and expressing my admiration for and my identification with inspiring modern day icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Romy Schneider, Michael Jackson, Grace Kelly and Niki de Saint Phalle.
My icon self-portrait series is influenced by the work of surrealist female artists like Frida Kahlo and Niki de Saint Phalle as well as by Italian author Luigi Pirandello's post-modernist approach on identity theory. And it is based on a series of coincidences, that brought me to explore and re-think the inherent nature of portraying providing a practical meaning to the American poet William Carlos Williams' quote: «The artist is always and forever painting only one thing: a self-portrait».

Keywords: Paintings, Pastels, Pattern, Shooting, Targets, Self-portrait, Mona Lisa, Collage, Conceptual, Niki De Saint Phalle, Synthetic Resin, Grey

Subjects: Pop Culture/Celebrity

Styles: Conceptual, Portraiture, Modern, Fine Art, Surrealism

Mediums: Photo, Paint, Manipulated

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