About Monika Umba
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Education
2006 - 2009
Cambridge School of Art
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Biography
Monika Umba specializes in painting, digital design and animation. She studied Animation and Illustration at Cambridge School of Art. Her unique painting style evolved alongside motion pictures and media based art, which is her great passion. Monika’s style can be described as surrealistic, quirky in principle, often with magical subject matter. Artist has said that her style resulted from a study of animation, American and Mexican murals and artists such as Hieronymus Bosh and Peter Breugel.
Although Monika also creates more traditional landscapes or purely decorative work, most of her works fit in style somewhere between Surrealism and Magical Realism. She looks at the mundane through a mysterious lens, ‘tongue in cheek’ and presents a fantastic quality of reality. In her paintings, we see relationships between people and become familiar with their personalities as soon as we open the shutters of their dwellings. The starting point of each painting is a question, ‘what if…” which the artist answers in a visual way according to her own experiences and imagination. Her imagery is drawn from a range of everyday situations, but embodied in forms from of unexpected juxtapositions, containing elements of surprise. The vivid palette she uses magnifies peculiarity of her works. Here strange people and half-people weightlessly flow in the air, walking their dogs, reading in the clouds or having a flamingo perched on their shoulder.
Monika’s paintings include elements of illustration, animation and painting. They often contain hidden messages and clues for the viewer leaving it to the their imagination to fill in those gaps in the image.They may be in forms of signpost, direction of movement or suggested ‘real time’ in the painting. Artist leaves the paintings ‘ajar’, under-told, encouraging the viewer to create the end of the story.
Monika was featured in Artists and Illustrators, Art Quarterly magazine, Cambridge-based Agenda and Explorer and also in Good Old Drawing book (to be published shortly). Some of Monika’s works have been used as cover illustrations for Cambridge School of Art magazines and Anglia Ruskin University stationery.
She has won numerous artistic competitions, such as:
2009 First Prize Winner, Searle Award for Creativity, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
2008 Highly commended Work, Searle Award for Creativity, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
2008 First Prize Winner in Climate Change animation competition organised by Cambridgeshire Film Consortium
2007 First Prize Winner, Competition for Young Artist, Cambridge Drawing Society
Monika has recently moved from Cambridgeshire to Wiltshire and is presently working as a freelance artworker and animator.
Although Monika also creates more traditional landscapes or purely decorative work, most of her works fit in style somewhere between Surrealism and Magical Realism. She looks at the mundane through a mysterious lens, ‘tongue in cheek’ and presents a fantastic quality of reality. In her paintings, we see relationships between people and become familiar with their personalities as soon as we open the shutters of their dwellings. The starting point of each painting is a question, ‘what if…” which the artist answers in a visual way according to her own experiences and imagination. Her imagery is drawn from a range of everyday situations, but embodied in forms from of unexpected juxtapositions, containing elements of surprise. The vivid palette she uses magnifies peculiarity of her works. Here strange people and half-people weightlessly flow in the air, walking their dogs, reading in the clouds or having a flamingo perched on their shoulder.
Monika’s paintings include elements of illustration, animation and painting. They often contain hidden messages and clues for the viewer leaving it to the their imagination to fill in those gaps in the image.They may be in forms of signpost, direction of movement or suggested ‘real time’ in the painting. Artist leaves the paintings ‘ajar’, under-told, encouraging the viewer to create the end of the story.
Monika was featured in Artists and Illustrators, Art Quarterly magazine, Cambridge-based Agenda and Explorer and also in Good Old Drawing book (to be published shortly). Some of Monika’s works have been used as cover illustrations for Cambridge School of Art magazines and Anglia Ruskin University stationery.
She has won numerous artistic competitions, such as:
2009 First Prize Winner, Searle Award for Creativity, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
2008 Highly commended Work, Searle Award for Creativity, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
2008 First Prize Winner in Climate Change animation competition organised by Cambridgeshire Film Consortium
2007 First Prize Winner, Competition for Young Artist, Cambridge Drawing Society
Monika has recently moved from Cambridgeshire to Wiltshire and is presently working as a freelance artworker and animator.
