Monica Metsers was born in 1980 in Wellington, New Zealand, but has lived in the English Lake District for the majority of her life. Monica graduated from the University of Dundee with a Masters Degree in Fine Art in 2005 and has been steadily exhibiting and selling her work nationally since then. In 2007 she was short-listed for the Celeste Art Prize and in 2011 was shortlisted for New Lights/The Valeria Sykes Prize for young painters, and was awarded second prize from around 400 entries for regional art prize 'Open Up North'. In 2012 Monica exhibited alongside artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Turner Prize nominee George Shaw in 'Francis Bacon to Paula Rego: Great Artists' at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. In 2016 she was shortlisted for Cumbrian Artist of The Year, and in 2017 her work went on a major museum tour of China with the Contemporary British Painting collective. Her works are now in numerous private and public collections.

Monica’s work reflects a lifelong infatuation with fantasy and the surreal. She is currently exploring depiction of place, particularly the landscapes she is repeatedly drawn to, those of both the Lake District and The West Coast and Islands of Scotland. She visits, explores and walks in both places regularly, where she uses a combination of memories, snapshots and pencil and watercolour sketches to create her works. In her paintings, she looks to express the place between seeing, feeling, experience and memory, and loves to connect with the viewer through this unspoken visual language.

 

Her paintings are worked up in layers, building up different thicknesses to create a sculptural and dreamlike effect. As a painter/printmaker, she enjoys the interplay between the two very different mediums. In her Lino Prints she pushes the possibilities of the process, introducing many painterly techniques to achieve a real sense of feeling and movement.