Meownica Studio

Monica
Dinculescu

Hi! I'm a printmaker and generative artist. I currently live in California with my husband, two dogs, two cats, and far too many plants. My work tends to fall in one of two areas: realism or weird (creative!) reconstruction. When I paint realistic scenes, I take something familiar, like the inside of a cafe, and try to provoke a feeling of absence and melancholy. When I want to be more conceptual, I take that familiar thing and to blur the lines between what is seen and what exists in real life. Either way, I hope to inspire an appreciation for the visual complexity of the real world.

Printmaking

I fell in love with linocutting during the pandemic, as a way to make art away from my computer. After primarily printing generative art, I saw linocutting as a way to seize the means of my art production (heh), but I soon discovered that I missed the unpredictability of relying on code. I started exploring collaborating and co-creating with a variety of large image models (such as Dall-E and MidJourney), as a way of controlling the exploration phase of an artwork.

My process is usually:

I have an idea!
I generate / remix / explore / curate hundreds of images with an ML model until I find something that matches "what's in my head"
I take that image and fix it up (which can be anything from redrawing part of it, making sure hands look like hands, or merging several ML created ideas into one)
Carve it, ink it, print it, ship it, squirrel!

I like the restrictions of linocutting; I find it's a very humbling medium, where you have to own up to all your mistakes.

Generative Art

My generative work examines the geometries found in nature and simplifies their shapes as digital art pieces using mathematics.

I "program" my art on a computer by creating code that intentionally introduces randomness in its output. While this means that I can't predict exactly what each of my programs will create, I do control where and how the randomness enters the artwork. I then curate hundreds of outputs from each program until I find the artwork that is the closest to what I had in mind when starting that piece. I find that generative art lets me focus more on the creative aspects of art, and forces me to work around the technical limitations of the medium.

I also dabble in traditional media formats like pastels and watercolours, which might make an appearance one day when I find sharing them less intimidating.