craig mooney
craig mooney works on canvas with an essay by
ric kasini kadour
west branch gallery & sculpture park 17 towne farm lane • p.o. box 250 • stowe, vermont • 05672 8 0 2 . 2 5 3 . 8 9 4 3 • w w w. w e s t b r a n c h g a l l e r y. c o m
This catalog accompanies the March 7 - April 26, 2009 exhibition of Craig Mooney’s recent paintings at the West Branch Gallery & Sculpture Park 17 Towne Farm Lane/ P.O. Box 250 Stowe, Vermont 05672 (p) 802.253.8943 www.westbranchgallery.com art@westbranchgallery.com Craig Mooney: Works on Canvas Š West Branch Gallery & Sculpture Park All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced without the express written consent of the copyright holders and the publisher. Designed by Amy Rahn Photography by Amy Rahn Printed by Kasini House, Burlington Vermont
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craig mooney & the dramatic moment by ric kasini kadour
The son of an amateur painter, Craig Mooney grew up in midtown Manhattan, spent his college years in Boston and, after a film career that took him to Texas and London, now makes Vermont his home. He makes paintings of dramatic moments and heightened emotionality that are known for being expansive and expressive. Mooney’s landscapes incorporate a myriad of abstract qualities. He uses sky and turbulent weather to evoke intensity and paints a wide view of valleys and fields. When he paints cities, he paints the urban landscape as the Hudson River School painted canyons: The sun breaks through the skyscrapers and the streets flow like rivers across the scene. In his figurative work, Mooney romanticizes his subjects and presents them through an atmospheric lens that is best described as dreamlike. Mooney’s paintings work because he invites the viewer to commune with the act of creation, to complete what he has started. The work offers opportunities for intimacy and conneclate day street tion in a milieu that transcends time and place. These Oil on Canvas, 40” x 40” are visually smart and sophisticated paintings by an artist who is fluent in visual language. I. Community
windswept Oil on Canvas, 40” x 40”
In 1962, Gerhard Richter declared, “Art serves to establish community. It links us with others, and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.” (1) Mooney’s paintings use a form of minimalism to connect with the viewer. Windswept shows a man wearing a trench coat walking quickly through a muddied but decidedly urban landscape. Blowing around the man are pieces of paper and other refuse. Mooney gives the viewer subtle visual clues that allow him or her into the painting. The man is walking on a flat surface and against a solid backdrop. This suggests he is on a sidewalk in a city. He is walking towards the wind and towards the sunlight. The distance between his feet suggests he is walking quickly. The wind is fierce and strong enough to blow up large pieces of paper. 3
Mooney renders the dramatic moment in Windswept in cinematic fashion. John Belton defines cinematic space as “a space that is ‘other’ for the spectator, who is necessarily segregated from it, physically prohibited from entry into it.” (2) The viewer cannot move along with him down the street. He cannot feel the wind or turn and see the sun. The debris blowing in the street will not hit him. That is to say, the viewer is only permitted to watch the figure in Windswept from the distance of the other side of the canvas.
windswept (detail)
This is where the brilliance of Mooney’s stylistic approach becomes apparent. The subject of Windswept is not the figure; it is the moment in time which the figure occupies. The man in the trench coat is simply an actor, like the paper in the wind or the sun shining on the man’s face. Had Mooney rendered the moment in a realistic fashion, the painting would be a fraud and its subject such a fiction that no one would accept it. It would be boring and insignificant. A more realistic rendering would cause the viewer to ask questions the narrator would be forced to answer: Who is this man? Where is he? Why is the wind blowing so hard? Where did the debris come from? What is the artist trying to say about urban sanitation or climate change? The viewer would drown in a sea of confusion.
From a strictly Aristotelian perspective, the stylized reality in Mooney’s paintings do not use mimesis to exaggerate reality, but to exaggerate the poetry of the moment by obfuscating reality. The narrator of the painting—Mooney himself—does not promise us answers, reality, or anything more than a few brush strokes suggesting shape and form. The viewer doesn’t engage this painting by feeling the wind or by being in the moment. The viewer engages this painting by finishing it, by answering the questions left unanswered by the painter-narrator. In short, Mooney invites us to complete his moment to be a creator alongside him. This is community. II. Intimacy In The Reader, a woman sits on a couch reading a book. Her hair is in a bun. Her v-neck dress is long and covers her ankles. She holds the book in her lap, which suggests she may not be actually reading. Perhaps she is holding the book, waiting for an answer to a question. Her gaze is a mystery. She could be looking at the viewer or looking down at the book. She sits in an empty room. Mooney accomplishes this painting with a series of broad brush strokes that are refined by scrapes of a palette knife. The face of the woman in The Reader contains barely a dozen 4
gestures. Mooney allows the paint to drip, to float and shows the brush and the knife’s work in how the paint rests on the canvas. This technique allows for some remarkable painting and color work. Below the book in The Reader is an intensely kinetic piece of painting where reds and yellows are cut by whites and blues. The strokes are large and active. The colors are dynamic and bright. They pop. The woman’s lap is alive with color. Mooney’s female figures present a complicated sexuality. The woman in The Reader wears a long dress and a tight bun which suggests a certain prudishness, yet the v-shape of her neck line sug- the reader gests a hint of sensuality. The bun reappears in The Oil on Canvas, 48” x 48” Bather, where the woman is nude and holding a piece of clothing. Whether she is dressing or undressing is unclear. We are watching her. She doesn’t let on if she is aware of the viewer or not. She is indifferent to her nudity, relaxed, open while being modest. In Quiet Repose, the naked figure has her back to the viewer, who is catching the woman in a private moment. Yet, she is not startled. She either doesn’t know we are there or doesn’t care and either suggests a powerful emotional intimacy.
the reader (detail)
The success of these paintings is predicated on the viewer connecting with the dramatic moment they present. That moment is an intimate one.
III. Time One has to view Mooney’s painting remembering that the visual language we speak today is not the same as our great-grandparents’. The rise of the photograph and the history of abstract expressionism has reshaped how we take in and understand images. We no longer see paintings as sources of accurate, realistic visual information. Nor do we see realistic images as the simple rendering of truth. All images reveal a truth greater than the image itself. How an artist gets at that truth defines his style and technical approach. His ability to engage the viewer with that truth, his ability to make his image stand out in a world overrun with images of all sorts, defines his stature and success. Mooney’s paintings play with the viewer’s sense of time in a number of ways. The physical execution of the paintings are meant to evoke a sense of immediacy and the capturing of a 5
single moment in time. Were they smaller, Mooney’s paintings could pass for late 19th century pochades. The quick fast moving strokes, which are a necessity when painting en plein air, are used here to give the painting a sense of now. The fashion of his figures, when they are wearing clothes, trench coats and long dresses or the lily downbrim hat in Promise, draws from late Victorian and Edwardian periods. When nude, the female figures are voluptuous by today’s standards, free of the anorexic boniness that defines contemporary media portrayals of women. To contextualize Mooney’s paintings one has to go back to European Impressionism and turn of the 20th century American Realism. Avenue, for example, echoes Robert Henri’s Snow in New York and its moody rendering of the city. The debris in Windswept and the muddy-murky look of City Mist show both an unromantic, almost Ashcan School view of urban space, and a deeply sympathetic humanism of later artists. Mooney’s positioning of women evokes Edward Hopper’s Summer Interior, a piece painted not long city mist after Hopper arrived in Europe. Mooney’s use of Oil on Canvas, 40” x 40” light is Hopperesque, but there the comparison ends. Hopper was obsessed with the alienation of modern life. Mooney has worked through those issues. Many of the questions artists were asking about humanity at the beginning of the 20th century have been answered. Humanity has accepted modernity. Mooney’s paintings are not nostalgic throwbacks. Mooney’s paintings take in all these styles—American Realism, European Impressionism, pochades, etc.—and gives them back to us with one important contemporary addition: the use of blur. In Photography: A Cultural History, Mary Warner Marien observes: “The postmodern notion of indeterminate, circular meaning gave the blurred image a new lease on life as a multivalent symbol, alluding to transient and fragmentary moments, fuzzy or disfigured identities, or indistinct and ambiguous knowledge.” (3) Where for much of the last century, blur was used in art to disorient and reorient the viewer, Mooney is using blur to commune with the viewer, to invite him or her into the creative process. Blur is the means by which he connects the viewer to the truth of his painting. In Silk Robe, Mooney paints the profile of a woman standing. The world around her is an unknowable wash of white with hues of browns and blues. Mooney renders her clothes with a melange of up-to-down strokes. Mooney paints dark blues and blacks and highlights them with whites and orange. A touch of red graces the woman’s neck. This abstract rendering of her clothes, the blurry, dream-like quality of the painting makes it timeless. She will never be out of fashion. She will never age. She has a before and an after, but she will always be in that moment....when Mooney painted her, and we saw her. 6
Sources (1) Gerhard Richter, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, David Britt. The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993. Translated by David Britt. Boston: MIT Press, 1995 (2) Belton, John “The Space of Rear Window� MLN, Vol. 103, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1988), pp. 1121-1138. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988 (3) Mary Warner Marien. Photography: A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006
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paintings
silk robe Oil on Canvas, 48” x 48”
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the reader Oil on Canvas, 48” x 48”
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serene light Oil on Canvas, 36” x 36”
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the bather Oil on Canvas, 48” x 60”
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woman in the red chair Oil on Canvas, 48” x 48”
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quiet repose sketch Gouache on Paper, 16” x 20”
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quiet repose Oil on Canvas, 36” x 36”
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windswept Oil on Canvas, 40” x 40”
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city mist Oil on Canvas, 40” x 40”
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morning street Oil on Canvas, 36” x 36”
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late day street Oil on Canvas, 40” x 40”
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avenue Oil on Canvas, 48” x 72”
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artist’s statement Craig Mooney’s work is purposefully ambiguous. He communicates with the viewer in the space that exists between the painting and the viewer’s impression of it. Mooney uses brushes and pallet knives to build form, gesture, and color into figures that exist within the picture plane, and linger in the memory. Mooney’s work has been called dreamlike. His figures belong to something beyond photographic reality. They come from the refractive, blurred eye of the memory, of the sleeping mind. These paintings come from a reality that never existed, but is instantly recognizable.
ric kasini kadour Ric Kasini Kadour is a writer and artist. He lives in Montreal, Quebec. Kadour is the former Vermont editor of Art New England and co-author of the Vermont Art Guide. Kadour has contributed writing for a number of books and catalogs; most recently: “Ethan Murrow’s America” in Ethan Murrow (Obsolete Gallery, 2008); introductory essay in John Matusz: Recent Work (West Branch Gallery, 2007) and “The Epic Journey: Paintings of Giovanna Cecchetti” in Giovanna Cecchetti (West Branch Gallery, 2007). His writing has appeared in a number of publications including Vermont Magazine, Seven Days, Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, and Salt Lake Metro, and others. His poetry has appeared in publications such as Green Mountain Review, Limestone Circle, Bay Windows, Catalyst, and Taproot. In 2005, he released the chapbook of the poem/essay, “How to Price Your Art?” Kadour co-owns and operates Kasini House, a creative production company, art gallery, and book publisher in Burlington, Vermont and Montreal, Quebec.
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west branch gallery & sculpture park West Branch Gallery & Sculpture Park is an indoor/outdoor art venue representing the region’s finest contemporary artists. The thoughtful selection and exhibition of art, and a respect for artists and collectors are gallery hallmarks. The gallery provides an inviting space for visitors to experience quality art in their own way. Located aside the West Branch of the Little River, the sculpture grounds and gallery are open to the public Wednesday through Sunday. Private consultations are available. Inquiries are welcome.
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west branch gallery & sculpture park 17 towne farm lane • p.o. box 250 • stowe, vermont • 05672 802.253.8943 • www.westbranchgallery.com