Monica Albu’s pursuit of art comes from an unselfish place: she doesn’t want to be the next Jackson Pollock, she wants to enable people to express themselves and be creative. “I think that people are afraid to be creative, and people are afraid to express themselves with a pen, or with an instrument, to just take that time and see what comes out of it,” she said.

“It’s definitely a scary thing, but it is so important...Create art in any way you can. It’s awesome, it feels good, it doesn’t have to be realistic, or pretty, or what other people want to hang up on their walls. Everyone should push themselves to be creative,” she said with sincere enthusiasm.

Art was Monica’s outlet as a child because it was the only thing she could do without getting distracted. She continued her dabbling in art until high school, when she began taking art more seriously. “I had a really weird, bizarre art teacher who I connected to really strongly. He was really supportive,” she said.

“Even though I always deflect compliments and get uncomfortable, he pushed me to make art, not to just mess around with art.”

Monica is now an Art major who has found a passion for printmaking, attracted by the physicality and the process of creating prints.

Combining her desire to help people with her love of art, Monica worked at the intensive psychiatric floor of a New York hospital, which used art therapy as a medical tool. “I worked with really sick patients: severely schizophrenic, or suffering from major depression, eating disorders, some would come from [having detoxed] from substance abuse and enter our care.…We would spend a lot of time talking to the patients through the art. We’d have them make self-portraits and explain why they made what they did,” she explained of the process.

Monica was affected by the way in which patients’ art reflected their mental states. She related the story of a patient with bipolar disorder, “[The patient] seemed really put together and I was really confused as to why she was there. She was really friendly, sociable, didn’t seem to be disconnected from other people. But she would come into art therapy group and the things she would create were completely manic.     

“Patients had to reflect their self-image onto these facemasks and she would grab every single [item]: glitter, sparkles, feathers, paints, and she would just dump it on the mask instead of creating a face,” she finished.

Monica said patients with bipolar disorder, during their manic phases, “have so much energy and they need to have everything around them….It’s so interesting how I couldn’t see her illness interacting with her, but it came out so strongly through her art.”

With her interest in art made by the mentally ill and outsider art, Monica has come to believe in art as an avenue of expression when other communicative avenues fail.

“Patients wouldn’t speak at all, to doctors, to nurses,” she reflected of her time at the psychiatric floor, “but they would come to art therapy and they would completely open up. They wouldn’t have to say anything, but with a crayon in their hand and a piece of paper in front of them, they would open up in a way they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”

This expressivity and honesty manifests itself in her own artistic aesthetic and her desire for everyone to dabble in art. “I think something happens when we make art, or music, or when we write poetry. It’s this vulnerability: we are stripping down to this essential quality that we have.

“We’re putting out these emotions without sculpting them to project what other people want them to be,” she explained. “It’s very much from the inside, and I think, especially when thinking about art from the mentally ill, they have this unselfconscious flow of emotion.”

Her current works in printmaking are portraits of her patients that try to incorporate this unselfconsciousness. “Part of [my work] is trying to portray the things that [my patients] taught me and let go of technique, or the standard of how something should look, and sort of feeling it and letting it happen,” she explained.

“I get very scared when I create art, that I’m not coloring inside the lines, that I’m not making things the way they should look,” she admitted honestly.

“But I think when you forget that then you get to the feeling behind it. And [the result] can be scary, and creepy, and freak people out, but that’s real….I think we are so constricted in what we think we are allowed to create,” she said, “and letting go of those boundaries is when the real stuff comes out.”