She’s Not Telling All

There are two finished canvases in Monique Prieto’s Echo Park studio. Each features broad areas of such flat, offbeat colors as grape, olive and rose on raw canvas. They give off the lively, happy feel of children’s drawings, which makes sense because Prieto is surrounded by children. Guillermo, 6, Emmet, 4, and Rose, 2, all are eager for her attention. And Prieto is ready and willing to accommodate their youthful demands. Despite the fact that she has a solo show opening at ACME gallery Nov. 17, she is putting the finishing touches on a realistically scary painting of a haunted pond for the Halloween carnival at Guillermo’s school.

Prieto, 39, self-consciously sweeps aside her long dark hair with one hand and her dark eyes smile. Her husband, art-rock composer Michael Webster, has been the one reminding her that the Halloween picture must now take a back seat to painting for her own upcoming show.

Prieto has maintained a charmed international career with shows selling out in L.A., New York and London for the past six years despite the simultaneous challenge of being pregnant or caring for babies most of that time.

She knows this is not typical and she certainly doesn’t want to be seen as “the woman who has everything.” It’s just that having children helps her focus. “The paradox is you’d think it would make life harder. But in a way it makes things easier because it makes things so much clearer.” After having a child, she felt that so many “nagging questions” started to answer themselves. “I enjoy the perspective,” she says. “I feel like my life is more purposeful.”

Her abstract paintings of brightly colored shapes have been compared to the Color Field paintings of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. Because of her youth and graduate degree from theory-driven CalArts, critics have seen her work as reinventing a genre that had dropped off the radar screen of cutting-edge contemporary art. The fact that her seemingly spontaneous abstractions were painstakingly conceived on the computer before being painted on canvas made them more appealing, more of the moment. In Art in America, critic Raphael Rubinstein wrote, “Some viewers may carp at the fact that these ebullient compositions are computer-aided, but others (like me) will be too swept up by the visual excitement on offer to give a damn how it came into the world.”

But even her decision to draw on a computer using Painter software was the result of being a mom. After the birth of her first son in 1994, she found there was half the time to do twice the work. Her husband suggested using the computer while she was nursing. Using the software’s pen with flat color, she found “the results were not unlike the drawings I used to do before the computer.”

“It was a great suggestion and I haven’t stopped using it since,” she says. Over the years, the computer has affected her drawing style, and these days, she lets the pixilated edge of the line remain apparent. In earlier works, she would smooth out such rough edges. “When making the paintings, I used to ignore the idiosyncrasies of the digitalized line,” she explains. “More and more, I’ve been giving in to it.”

The shapes that are translated from drawing to canvas may look abstract to most viewers, but they represent specific narratives for Prieto, narratives that she keeps to herself.

“If I were to tell what I believed I was picturing, I’d rule out other people’s feelings,” she says, sitting down on a foam cushion in her studio.

Her painting of about 3 by 4 feet resting on an easel is titled “Ready and Able.” Vaguely figurative shapes in rose seem to be frantic, or perhaps they’re dancing under a large mass of deep purple. Could she clarify? “I’m just giving people something to have a moment with,” she says. “Seeing the figures as in distress or happy means that is what the viewer needed to see at that time.”

Because Prieto sees her paintings as narrative, she finds little in common with the ardently abstract Color Field painters, although she admits Ellsworth Kelly was an influence. But what of all the critical interpretations? “It was a little frustrating, but being young and out of school, I was glad anyone cared to pay attention to the work,” she says. “Certainly, I’d looked at that Color Field painting. But I see art critics as people doing their own creative work. One thing that is great about painting is that there is a slippage and many layers of interpretation. It’s not for me to say you are completely wrong.”

Prieto has to fight her inherent modesty. She still seems surprised to be an artist. She considers it partly cultural. Her Mexican American parents were divorced when she was 8, so she was raised by her Mexican immigrant grandparents in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her parents and maternal grandparents were creative in music, poetry and painting, surrounding themselves with artistic friends. But no one thought of such activities as a career. “It didn’t occur to any of us that you could be an artist,’ she recalls. ‘You could be creative, but otherwise you had to have a job and family.”

Attending Immaculate Heart High School, Prieto was encouraged in her art thanks to the art education program established by graphic artist Sister Corita Kent, although she was no longer teaching. Prieto went on to L.A. City College, taking general studies and art courses, all the while expecting her fate to be homemaker. “It’s a cultural thing,” she explains. “I was brought up to get out of high school, get married and have a family. Art school wasn’t an easy decision.”

But her LACC teachers encouraged her to transfer as an art major to UCLA. Soon, she began to realize that it might be possible to support herself as an artist. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1987, she moved to New York City. She came back to L.A. after a year and a half when she was included in a group show of Latino art at a now-defunct gallery in Long Beach. Ultimately, however, she decided she wanted to steer clear of such categories. “I didn’t want to be relegated to a corner. I just wanted to be an artist. I wanted to reach people who were from my background and beyond.”

She also reunited with Webster, whom she had first met in her undergraduate days. Webster, in graduate school at CalArts, encouraged her to pursue an advanced degree there. In the course of moving back to L.A., she found an autobiography she’d been assigned to write when she was 12. In it, she had written that her goal was to be an artist and go to CalArts. It seemed like fate had stepped in. “I like to let random things like that make decisions for me,” she says.

She enrolled at CalArts and graduated with a master’s in fine arts in 1994. Meanwhile, in 1993, she married Webster. She was eight months pregnant with their first child when approached about a 1994 show by the up-and-coming ACME gallery: “I knew it was my chance, and I cranked out that first show of paintings in a few weeks.” Of those abstract paintings, she says, “It was a quiet show that felt as though I were on the verge of something.”

That something became apparent in 1995 when critics praised her second show and many of the paintings sold. In Art Issues magazine, Michael Darling wrote, “Prieto’s work exudes a youthful irreverence toward painterly traditions that both acknowledges its precedents and stridently breaks free of them, without slipping into bratty grandstanding.”

She didn’t tell anyone that her paintings of large blobs of color atop one another were derived in part from playing with her newborn son and his toys.

She feels those paintings demonstrated “a requisite kind of optimism.” And she has been exploring that ever since.

Outside her window, banana trees sway. The sounds of clucking chickens, which she keeps for their fresh eggs, and chattering children make their way into the studio.

“If you are bringing people into the world, you have to see what is positive,” she says.

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MONIQUE PRIETO, ACME, Space 1, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Dates: Saturday-Dec. 22. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.. Phone (323) 857-5942.