Alice Walker on Monica's work

Monica Sjöö, the great artist whose work is timeless, has presented us with images of ancestors and of the ancient world that nourish and sustain. Searching from within her own heart out into the heart of nature and of memory, sitting with the ruins and that which has been paved over, peering into the abyss and holy well, she has created masterpiece after masterpiece of the human and female soul. Her work is astonishing. Arresting. So moving that, usually, one finds, upon examining it, no need of speech. It has a completeness, in that sense, that much art lacks. We stand before her canvases, often quite large, as before a field of yellow sunflowers or green corn, or the sea.

I think it is because she is painting that which has been silenced, hidden, almost thoroughly. I believe many of the images she reintroduces to us were meant never to appear before female eyes again. It is as if she is reintroducing us to our lost passions. Passions about the earth, about nature, about true worship, about our own strength and power in the face of the mystery that we, as humans and women, inhabit.

Her gift to us is measureless as is her integrity and implacable dedication to the tending of earth and the psychic health of awakening human beings.

Alice Walker
Writer/Poet/Artist
November 2003