Monika Steinhoff

Over my 50 years as a professional artist in Santa Fe, I have pursued several media, including drawing, batik, watercolors, etchings, oil painting, monoprints, and, finally, egg tempera. My mature work included popular interiors of Santa Fe and Northern NM, plus commissions for posters as far north as Durango and south to Cloudcroft. Then my focus changed from realistic figurative paintings to more personal experience, leaving behind studies from drawings and my photographs to working from my imagination’s interaction with my own perception of the ‘contemporary, social, political, and spiritual world’. The first series of 10 years, “Journey of the Fool,” eventually became “Collective Folly” as the Nation and worldwide folly has grown, as well as my age in progressing through my 80’s. After focusing on Societies' foibles for the last 30 years in my major works, I now look for simpler, more peaceful themes. While society seems far more chaotic and destructive than before, the images I seek/create, still symbolic, poetic, and mystical, offer my heart some peace and healing through a ‘higher’ vantage point, and are still challenging, with a note of humor and joy.