The style artist Alyssa Warren makes her own reflects a dynamic life. Just like no two monotypes are identical, Alyssa is an artist with unique personal and academic experiences that she reflects in her medium. Alyssa grew up in the United States, attending university in Santa Barbara where she earned a BA in literature. Then she traveled to Sydney, where she earned her MA in the subject. In Ecuador she taught modern literature and creative writing. From where did her art spring? In London, where she attained a three-year printmaking diploma. (But it all came together for her in Paris, there she wrote for the cosmopolitan Surface magazine about art and fashion design.) Today, Alyssa lives in London with her husband and son. She writes fiction, works in textiles as well as interior and jewelry design. These elements all play a role in her work. She is fascinated by patterns. She finds these in nature and urban cityscapes. Her inspiration can be found in maps, train tracks and aerial photographs to name a few. Take a look and you’ll see aspects of her art do look like the endlessly varied natural forms viewed from the window of an airplane.
She finds enchantment in some unlikely places: tree bark, lily pads, moss and the alien worlds of bacteria, archaea and protozoa. Her clip file is flowing with pictures cut from art, fashion and gardening magazines, her own photographs, flyers and exhibition postcards. But as in wild nature - nothing is quite random. She categorizes her images in notebooks by color, texture and pattern. She finds order in scattershot. These notebooks of images influence her work, though she never copies from the directly. Seeing the creation of a monotype is fascinating; you’re witness to a process that will never happen again. Paint is applied to a plate. The plate is then pressed against paper and meshes into its fibers more deeply than brush paint. While a typical monotype artist may do this once, Alyssa repeats the process over and over to create a dynamic, eye-popping canvas.
She often works reductively, rolling color over a smooth plexiglas plate only to remove much of the ink, mask it, and dissipate it with turpentine, spatulas, droppers, paintbrushes, muslin, tissue, cotton balls and Q-tips. Other times she works additively - beginning with a clean plate, or a used plate with paint remaining that’s called the ghost image. What is unique about Alyssa is the combination of her rich expertise in the medium and her exhaustive technique. Alyssa will make new plates and press the same piece three to ten times, creating mesmerizing layers. Look at her artwork, you can just dive in and always find new elements in her patterns and colorscapes. Of course, this can take a long time... “I have spent many months printing sheet after sheet of unique circles, meticulously hand-tearing them out and collaging multiple layers of them onto one-of-a-kind backgrounds.” See her exciting work here
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