Studio Information
Marin Society of Artists
Space 16
About The Artist
For MOS 2025, I will be exhibiting artwork from my Boundary Oak Series. In late 2020, I began a body of work celebrating, honoring and memorializing the life of the historic 325-year-old Boundary Oak Tree that was tragically destroyed during an intense windstorm. The Boundary Oak was a California-native Valley Oak tree that once marked the boundary between Walnut Creek and Contra Costa County. This ongoing series consists of woodblock prints, monoprints, handmade paper, and mixed media pieces, with ash from the Boundary Oak Tree incorporated into each piece of artwork. Although the Boundary Oak Tree is no longer standing, it continues to live on in another time, form and place in my ongoing, evolving and ever-growing series.
Michelle Mongan is a San Francisco-based artist whose work includes printmaking, paintings, drawings and mixed-media. Although formally educated as an accountant and CPA, Mongan discovered her passion for art while taking a drawing class in college. Working as an accountant for many years, Mongan also studied drawing and painting with several renowned San Francisco artists. She retired from her accounting career and began publicly exhibiting her artwork in 2013. In 2015, Mongan began studying printmaking at the Sociedad Gráfica de Cienfuegos in Cienfuegos, Cuba under the direction of Cuban artist Rafael Cáceres, one of the Founders and the Director of the Sociedad Gráfica de Cienfuegos. She is incredibly honored by this rare opportunity and has been further honored to return in 2016-2019. Mongan’s work is influenced, in part, by: her teachers’ techniques, Belkis Ayón’s collagraphs, da Vinci’s drawings, Matisse’s lines, Schiele’s nudes, van Gogh’s swirls, Renoir’s eyes, Morisot’s warmth, Kahlo’s pain, and Nature’s crisis.
Prints and Printmaking
Marin Society of Artists
1515 3rd Street, San Rafael, CA