Keegan Monaghan

Keegan Monaghan: For me, the phone is something I wanted to paint because it's very familiar. 

Narrator: Keegan Monaghan discusses Incoming, a painting of a large red telephone.

Keegan Monaghan: It was an image that can be innocuous and somehow light, while also being dark and imposing.

This painting didn't have the light bulb in it originally. It was just the red phone, and then I realized that when I put the light in, that became the light source. That became also the drama in the painting.

I see a lot of the paintings as being internal views of certain head spaces. Something about the way that I paint is [that] I paint over things for so long that the surfaces get really built up, and I think that becomes―there's a kind of physicality to the paint because of that, but then there's also a psychological quality to it, which is built into the materiality of it.

There's also a poignant metaphor that happens with being far away and seeing an image a certain way, and walking up to it and having it change, and also obliterate a little bit. That the image itself breaks down, and you see it just as―hopefully at all times you see it as an image, but then you also see it as material paint on canvas.

The way hopefully the paintings work is [that] they vibrate between different emotional tones. I really would like the paintings to be funny and sad, and to be light, and also scary and heavy at the same time.