Mona Caron, Swiss Muralist in San Francisco – English Version

Article posted on August 3, 2009 on the BAIA blog (disponibile anche in versione italiana).

I’m always fascinated by the variety and colors of murals and graffiti along the streets of San Francisco. Mostly concentrated in the Mission area, murals are popping up on every empty wall. Amid this artistic diversity, I recognize and enjoy a particular set of murals characterized by an absolutely unique and intriguing style. These are the murals created by Mona Caron, a local artist who hails from Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Mona is from the same small village as Gottardo Piazzoni, a well-known local artist of the first half of the twentieth century, whose most famous artworks are now exhibited at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.

When looking at a Mona’s mural, I feel like my eyes are gently guided through a dynamic perspective that continuously and gradually changes from a bird’s eye to spectacular close-ups.

I’m deeply fascinated by Mona’s murals. When standing in front of one of her murals, I feel my eyes gently guided through a dynamic perspective that shifts from a bird’s-eye view to spectacular close-ups. Like a good piece of music that gives me new pleasure every time I listen to it, Mona’s murals reveal new details and hidden meanings every time I peruse them.

The interview

To learn more about Mona Caron and her artistic experience, I asked her for an interview.

Franco: Mona, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your artistic activities?
Mona: My name is Mona Caron. I am a visual artist, mostly a muralist and illustrator. My large paintings appear on buildings, mostly in the streets of San Francisco, while my small paintings are tiny and serve as illustrations for books, magazines, posters, or other uses. I also do painting performances sometimes.

I’m Swiss-Italian, from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. That’s where I went to school through the Liceo (high school). We focused on literature in French, English, and German. Then I went to the University of Zurich for three years to study English literature, dropped out, came to San Francisco, and enrolled at the Academy of Art University downtown, majoring in illustration. Now I mostly work as a muralist, but I was never schooled in this endeavor. I’m an autodidact (self-taught).

Franco: You came to San Francisco from Intragna, a small village in the Ticino region of Switzerland. What limitations might there be for an artist living in a small town, even if it’s a beautiful Swiss village?
Mona: The area I’m from is a place that I still derive inspiration from. My connection with nature, and the way I observe and represent it, has everything to do with my place of origin. However, there were not many opportunities there for me to live as an artist, and when I left, I had not even considered becoming one. Even though the nearby town of Locarno (and Ticino as a whole) is quite rich in culture and has many artists living there, it was necessary for my own path to go far away to both become an artist and explore what I’m about.

I started creating murals thanks to a chance encounter. I was invited to do my first mural here in San Francisco by a member of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition right after I graduated from the Academy of Art University. At first, I refused simply because I had no idea how to do a mural—that is, how to paint something hundreds of times the size of my own body and somehow still keep control over how it looks. I was encouraged to just, well… figure it out! So I did. I feel that the city has pushed me toward this attitude of possibility by giving me the opportunity to expand the range of things that I can do. That, I find, is another difference between my place of origin and SF.

Franco: You invested an incredible amount of time in creating some of the most astonishing murals in town. But murals are among the most fragile forms of art, exposed to the elements and vandalism. How do you deal with this intrinsic fragility of your art?
Mona: I try to use certain precautions, like using only permanent pigments and varnishing the finished painting, but unless you create real frescoes on fresh plaster and keep them in protected environments, which is not an option in a modern city street, murals are not forever. That’s just the way it is. Because of this, sometimes my work feels a little like doing a giant, intricate sand mandala, as Buddhist monks do, meant to be blown away by the wind at any moment. But one of the thing that matter the most to me when I do a public mural, is not so much the finished product as the effect of creating it.

There is an expectation to produce things quickly and move on. By contrast, my murals are almost like super slow-motion performance art, and it is meant to stand in opposition to this trend.

I work very, very, very slowly. More slowly than people and society as a whole expect. We live in a society that is really sped up. Everything keeps getting quicker and quicker, and we all are getting shorter and shorter attention spans. There is an expectation to produce things quickly and move on. By contrast, my murals are almost like super-slow-motion performance art, and they are meant to stand in opposition to this trend. When I start a mural, people expect to see me there for days, but it ends up being months. I definitely do put an unexpected amount of life energy into something that people, as you were saying, expect to be ephemeral. But it’s precisely when people on the street realize my commitment to a spot that they themselves start changing their attitude towards it, slowing down too, and looking more closely at and appreciating the very place I’m working in, which they share with me. In that moment of pause, that’s when the conversations get really interesting.
It may be a combination of nostalgia and a Utopian direction for me to hark back to a time when people were still able and allowed to truly invest time, love, and care in the craftsmanship of what they do. And of course, that is something that flies against the principles of capitalism and the necessity of creating ever-greater profits. The world’s trend has been towards cheaper, worse-made products. Craftsmanship is now a total luxury. As a public muralist, I want to lavish some of that lost time and love onto public places shared by all, people of all class backgrounds and cultures.
In terms of vandalism, I’ve been pretty lucky so far. There is nothing that prevents it from happening. While the mural is in progress, anyone could come by and vandalize it or destroy the work; that’s just the nature of working in the street. I am conscious of that, and I simply decided to take that risk. Once a mural is finished, it gets coated with anti-graffiti varnish, as required by the City. But I actually tag my own murals! Since I live on the street for long periods of time, I meet everybody who frequents the street, including some taggers. The Market Street railway mural is full of tags from the kids I met around there. Except I put them in myself: I had the kids write their tags to my sketchbook, and I put them in the mural in perspective, in a way that works with my cityscapes. And since in my cityscapes I always try to show the myriad ways in which people interact with public space, adding the tags is only obvious, as I also include my favorite guerrilla posters, stencils, and all sorts of stuff you find in the street that I find interesting.

One of my leitmotifs is public space and how it is used. I’m always wishing for a more convivial way of co-inhabiting public space. By visually referencing all sorts of subcultures in my murals with cityscapes, I make different people aware of each other.

One of my leitmotifs is public space and how it is used. I’m always wishing for a more convivial way of co-inhabiting public space. By visually referencing various subcultures in my murals, I make different people aware of one another. And my being on the street painting is something that, in itself, brings a little more of this conviviality: people may be going home, shopping, or coming from work, and the mural offers a reason for them to stop and look. And maybe another neighbor stops and looks. And both start commenting on what they are seeing. All of a sudden, they ask each other for their names and where they live, and a connection is made. I see this happen all the time. And that’s really what my work is about.

Franco: Ever-changing perspective is one of the features that I appreciate the most in your artworks; it adds dynamism and forces me to look at them continuously from shifting angles. Is this feature in some way related to your personality or your vision of the world?
Mona: I don’t really know. I’m sure that in the process, I can’t help but express something about my personality subconsciously, but that is a side effect, not a goal. I’m a communicator, and I want to tell stories and advocate for things.

You mention my use of different perspectives. It is just a way for me to fit everything into the picture that I want to tell about. Since I’m free to create anything I want, visually, I stay away from showing things from an angle that is too close to the one we’re accustomed to. I portray the life we know, but perhaps from a bird’s eye view, which kind of gives you a sense of distance and allows you to reflect on the “bigger picture,” or from a bug’s eye view, which brings you to a level of minute observation that we rarely have time for in our regular lives. This way, people recognize familiar elements in the painting but gain a new perspective on them (literally and figuratively). This way, I may elicit reactions such as “Oh, wow! I never truly noticed this thing or place that I walk by every day. What is it about? Why does it exist? Why is it here? Has it always been like this?” And then, crucially: “Could it be different? Could it be better?”

When I paint nature from a bug’s eye perspective, I’m trying to make a more poetic point on the beauty and richness you find within anything upon close, loving observation.

When I paint nature from a bug’s-eye perspective, I’m trying to make a more poetic point about the beauty and richness you find within anything upon close, loving observation. I try to make the humblest of plants look spectacular and rich, separating beauty and ornamentation from monetary value. For example, I might show a beautiful flower, a dried leaf, seeds, and dead things… everything in nature has beauty. And that connects to the statement I made earlier about wishing we had more time to truly see things. Most people don’t have the time to go crawling around pulling up a random weed to gaze at its beauty – people will think you’re crazy. That’s a state of innocence that we have as children and a kind of openness I’d like to remind people of in my artwork.

Franco: Every single element in your murals is painted with incredible respect for reality while never trying to become a photographic representation. What drives you to be so respectful, for example, of the shape of a flower or a plant?
Mona: I’m not always so accurate. I do strive for some accuracy because I don’t think you can ever improve on nature. But because I’m a human, not a plant, when I observe a plant, I sort of empathize with its gesture, I imagine what it must feel like in my body to be that shape. I see the tension and relaxation of the way it grows, and I end up feeling it like a gesture, a dance. So then I paint the flower or plant as I feel it, and what comes out is rarely perfectly botanically accurate.

Franco: As an artist, you seem to immerse yourself in the problems and issues of our time, without being afraid of taking sides. How do you relate to artists who live protected in the art galleries or museums and keep their art insulated from everyday problems?
Mona: I do not assume that artists seen in galleries and museums do not relate to the problems of the world. Some do, and some don’t; every artist is different, and I have seen strong, interesting work in galleries. Perhaps what you refer to is that sometimes art is abstracted in such a way that it seems inaccessible to wider audiences. I recognize that. I do see myself differently from that because I do emphasize communication within my visual art: my point is narrative, not just aesthetic, and my visual narration is not abstruse but very approachable. Muralism is a populist medium and suits artists, such as myself, who seek to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds and social classes. I want to draw people in, not intimidate them, in the street.

You were saying that “I’m not afraid of taking sides.” Of course, I take sides, but I try not to beat people over the head with a political position. I try to be a little slayer than that. For example, I’m a little bit of a tradition-breaker as my political murals look, well, “pretty.” There is a great tradition in twentieth-century art that holds that the medium, look, and technique of artwork need to reflect your feelings and the themes you are addressing. So if that is war or injustice and you are angry about that, this ought to be reflected in your technique, in your stroke, in your selection of the medium. It may be a block print of the German impressionist rather than a painting of the century before, for example. I love that tradition, but I don’t do that in my murals. I fabricate Trojan horses with an appealing, even soothing, first impact. My work is on the street, and people see it every day. I want to provide a respite, some pleasure at first impact. Which is also a way for me to draw more viewers in for a closer look, less of a self-selected audience. Then, once people are close and at ease, that’s when the rest of the message unfolds. And the way it unfolds is, I hope, not in a preachy, slogan-like way. Rather, I just lay out all the things I want you to consider, calmly and matter-of-factly, and allow you, the viewer, to wander from one thing to the next and make causal and comparative connections among things. And it works, people get it. I’ve heard the humblest people articulate the ironies and reflections implicit in my mural with razor-sharp accuracy and make deep, incisive comments on it all.
Lastly, I don’t do galleries because I really prefer being in the street, despite all the dirt and craziness. An artwork’s environment inevitably influences our perception of it. So if you put any object in a pristine white gallery, it is bound to look extremely precious and rarefied. The white walls, the wine and cheese, the well-dressed people, and, most importantly, the price tag next to the painting, all together shape how we perceive the artwork. The street does something completely different to a mural, and I enjoy that different effect. I kind of like the strange way a mural impacts the surrounding reality in the street as well… it almost turns real life into a storybook, and people become characters within it.

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I would like to thank Mona Caron for taking the time for this interview. If you have a question for Mona or for BAIA, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment below. I would recommend visiting Mona’s website to find out more about her and her art. If you are in San Francisco, please take the time to visit her murals.

Versione Italiana