Monique Vettraino is a Canadian artist living and working in Toronto. She has been a creative soul making art for a lifetime but not until she took the course, Collage Explorations, at Toronto School of Art in 2018 that her creative path became clear. It was like all the pieces of art and life experience would have blended all their fragments together to in a mixed media nucleus.

As an artist, the mixed media collage is a visual language for her, that allows her to weave emotions by combining elements that each have their own story, their own mystery. In her works, she is interested to explore a person and its identity – what is historical, distorted, or very clear in terms of memory, experiences, and scarring and then what is stripped away. The outcome is the birth of a new tale, a layered paper poem of sorts. In her own words, she works in a highly intuitive manner and her works spawn from a flurry of activity. She builds her beautiful ensembles by decollaging the entity – tearing, ripping, and removing layers together with image transfers she digs out the desired weathered and worn-out feeling. It’s being a therapeutic and textural experience. Inspiration for it is reflected straight from the layers of humanity – what we keep hidden, what remains close to the surface and to the raw exposure, and then what remains forever left in the darkness.

She has taken part in various group shows and her works have been published in numerous art publications and zines. And what is so cool is that although she has been making collages “only” for about a year and a half, she already has created an incredible stylish line of collage works.

Check out her instagram @moniquevettraino for more!