This is a collection of work drawn from places recently visited and others she is very familiar with. The pictures are painted with great sensitivity and depth resulting in images full of emotion and atmosphere. Her complex skies give drama to her works, culminating in brooding rain studies, bleak snow scenes or warm, balmier seascapes.
These latest works have taken the element of carbon itself as a starting point. Ninety-five percent of everything that exists in the universe is said to be carbon and it is often called the backbone of life.
Peter’s sublime and classically-modelled nudes are still central to his work, but our attention is now drawn to “workings-out” on the paint surface – nicks, scraping, re-drawing – that remind us simultaneously of our quest for the ideal, and the ultimate vanity of that quest.
It is hard to conceive of these landscapes as real places. Perhaps the idealised landscapes and vistas of the mind. Backdrops to fairytales. However, unlike a proper fairytale they appear to contain no moral thus demonstrating a very modern indecision in which we all have a stake, between a landscape engineered in the mind, and one engineered in practical reality.
Monaghan's work is the result of a disciplined research into the experience of looking– the experience of pure visual sensation and aesthetic pleasure. Forms and colours are used in repetition to engage the viewer. It is a dialogue about light, colour, movement and illusion- exploring the contrasts between painted flat surfaces, protruding spheres, cubes or geometric shapes.
©2011