Monica Carvalho- Brooke Hockspiel

 

For my artist, I chose Monica Carvalho. Monica Carvalho explores photoshop photography featuring split images that combine two different people or things together. Her motto is to “make the ordinary extraordinary”. In most of her works, she combines people with objects or landscapes. More specifically, she does a lot of work with eyes, splitting a person’s eye with a beautiful lake or even as simple as a person’s pupil split with a person’s head. She also does work with lips, splitting up the bottom lip with a top landscape or in another work where she splits the lip in half vertically and makes half of it a leaf. She has also done some work with dogs and food. In one of her dog pieces, a dog can be seen as a part of a mountain. In a food piece, she has an ice cream cone being part of a railroad track .

Formal elements in her work are what truly makes it unique. All of her works of art are featured in color, and they all have a certain hue to it. She often leans towards cool colors since she uses a lot of photographs of water such as beaches or lakes. However, she also has some warm colors especially in her photographs featuring lips, to further blend in with the pink and red tones of lips. Compositionally, she manages to balance out everything with careful placement and editing in photoshop. 

Her work is often simply exploring beauty in both humans and nature. One work that’s really unique is Creativi-tree. Playing off the word Creativity, Carvalho features a closed eyelid, and underneath the lid there is an extensive tree and mountain landscape. It’s very mystic and beautiful. The eyebrow of the woman balances out the top of her eyelid with the bottom of this very lush and detailed landscape. Another work she created is called Lip Glass. Lip glass features a woman’s deep red lips, where the top half is her lip and the bottom half is a wine glass. The way that she blends the bottom photo with the top photo of the woman makes the piece almost appear as if it’s happening in real life. Lastly, another great piece she has created is called Whiskey on the Rocks. It features a dog who has been transformed into a mountain. Through the use of blending, she makes the dogs fur appear to be a part of the mountain behind him. She is very intentional about her photographs, making the backgrounds of the photographs similar colors to the landscape that it is going to be a part of.