by Ernst J. Grube

Nothing, really, is more difficult than writing about an artist’s work.

Words are just not images; if they were, the man might have written and not painted. One wants to say: just look at a painting and it will tell you all, And there, again, we use a word that has to do with words and not with images. So what to do? Tell you about it? Yes, let’s give it a try.

So the first thing to say, usually, is what an artist’s work reminds you of, and then, of course, you must name great names. Why? If, as is the case here, you want to talk of Jim Moon’s work, well, Jim Moon’s work reminds me of nothing so much as Jim Moon. Jim Moon is unique, and I am not using the term lightly — he really is! Of course his work reminds me of other artists’ work, as all artists’ work reminds you of other artists’ who have come before the artist in question.

No man is an island, especially not an artist; but an artist is, if he really is an artist in the true sense — that is, a man who has something to tell at the moment that will go far beyond the moment, both backwards and forwards in time — a man who can link us to past and present, who can become a link in the chain of which we are all a part, but which he understands better than any of us. So, not only is he not an island, he is a landmark, and that word I use not in the ordinary sense. He is a landmark in the sense that he marks the spot — the land — on which we stand at the moment.

But he connects that little piece of land we oc cup right now, each of us separately but also communally, with a lot — if not all — of that vast floating land that came before us and that stretches on, beyond us, into infinity. So he gives us a point of reference, a fixed point, something solid in the ever-fluid stream of time, and he makes us part of that movement towards — God only knows what — that is to come.

Jim Moon is such an artist.

You cannot look at his work without being “reminded” of something, but then what is it? And you cannot look at his work without being sure he is telling us something that we ought to have known, and perhaps, deep down — though not being artists — we only dimly “know,” and therefore, of course, cannot put into words. Here we go again — “words”!

But that is just it. Jim Moon does not put it in words, he puts it in images; that is what makes him universal. Because words, as much as they communicate, are limited: you have to know the language (and not just the vocabulary); you have to understand what each word means and how many different ways it can be, and often is, interpreted; otherwise you are completely lost.

Now, it may be true that images are not necessarily so immediately comprehensible as it would seem, and in some cases a word or two may help. That is why I have, with joy and humility, accepted an invitation to write about Jim Moon’s work. But basically it is the image that ‘speaks” (words again!) to the beholder.

If you just look at Jim Moon’s pictures and don’t “think” about them, but let them sink in, you will see (and that is one of the words we really want — looking, seeing, imagining); and you will find many things there you always knew but had not often thought about. Jim Moon’s images are like something we all have experienced, we all truly know, but, while reminding us of the reality around us, they are really not of that reality. They seem like images we may have seen in dreams, with all the references to the reality of our world, but different, somehow detached, removed, lifted to a higher — if you like — surreal “reality.”

Images fuse; forms take shapes that can be seen in different ways: a bird in the tree or a human face; an encounter of a mermaid and a youth in a rocky landscape, but maybe at the bottom of the sea; a youth riding in woods where large coral plants (?) grow; images may appear to be one thing and then another — trees in front of snowy peaks turn into legs and humps of what could be a rather large camel — “hills like while elephants” —; and finally, forms may dissolve into other forms — the human body all made up of butterflies or clouds, a mountain-lake inhabited by flamingoes reflected (?) in the sky, or, turned upside-down, another lake full of flamingoes (?).

There are of course images that appear- only too real, such as a very large elephant almost totally filling the picture’s space; but then, what is the little airplane doing there? Isn’t it like the buzzing fly, so annoying to calm and composure. But isn’t it also put in its place? The high, surging technological wonder of our day — a little speck in the sky just like a fly, of little weight when seen through the eyes of an elephant? How small the human couple is in the vast stone-covered piazza, when seen from the lofty height of the wise old monkey sitting on the parapet above, who does not even look at them but at us, asking: “Who are you?”, a question often, if not always, asked in Jim Moon’s pictures. But then, who are some of these creatures? Who is that extraordinary figure with a red body and a black face, clad in vaguely oriental garb, who plays (what?) with a proper little boy in the boy-scout uniform at a green table? And who is the youth in a sailor-suit, sitting in the lap of a big red monkey, both carried off by a faceless beturbaned man in an Indian jungle? And is it a man? His face has no face, his body seems to be made of pale blue sky with wispy clouds in it. These, indeed, are unforgettable images, “such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Clearly Jim Moon has a vision of this world which, as does that of all great artists, sublimates this world and makes us look at it again with new eyes, after we have gazed long enough at his pictures. And the next time you walk through the countryside you too, perhaps, if you are lucky, will see the face in the tree, and the flamingoes in the sky, and the leaves and the butterflies, and the clouds we all “are made on.”

Ernst J. Grube is a lecturer, curator, and writer who has held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University, and the Universities of Padova, Naples and Venice. He now divides his time between New York and Venice and coedits the biennial Islamic Art.

Reprinted with kind permission from the 1991 Jim Moon Retrospective Show Catalog of the NCCU Art Museum, North Carolina Central University, Durham, N.C.