by Paul Aho

Perhaps to be born with the name ‘Moon” is to be compelled to reflect and illuminate. Jim Moon has been creating singular and unique works of arts for over forty years. In his half century he has produced a body of paintings which give ample strength to this argument.

Moon’s art is more than compelling. It conjures images which are free flowing yet mythic, with the anomalous ability to maintain a distance from both pictorial representation and abstract art while embracing the Italian legacy with his uncanny sense of design.

Moon’s work is thus comparable to Italian painting of the quatracento both in structure and form, and to the Surrealists in its juxtapositions and multiple interpretations. Unlike the Renaissance, Moon’s images promote multiple rather than single points of view and unlike the surrealists, they illuminate the physical world, casting light on our collective experiences, rather than dwelling in the sub-conscious. All the work reflects the wonder of youth, Moon’s perennial preoccupation.

Jim Moon was born in Graham, North Carolina in 1928. He moved to New York to attend Cooper Union at the age of 16, then to Italy in 1952, painting and exhibiting in Perugia, Venice, and Asolo where he owned a house from 1960 to 1975. In 1965, he returned to North Carolina, where he remains an important influence. He founded the School of Visual Arts at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and played an instrumental role in the creation of the North Carolina Dance Theatre. Since then, Moon has held numerous other teaching appointments and exhibited regularly in New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere, His choice to live and work in rural Davidson County, far from established art centers, is consistent with Moon’s singular vision, more timeless than contemporary.

Although his subjects reveal Moon’s place in time, the mysteries they pose are those of the world itself. The exotic and the everyday coexist in a most straightforward way, conjoined in the physical world by circumstances and in Moon’s painted world by sleight of hand or caprice of vision. The eye is a part of the mind, and in Moon’s mind elephants and airplanes share the same space. He assigns no titles to his paintings, his viewer is forced to deal with the works’ unexpectedness and to find his own feelings and interpretations. Among Moon’s subjects are fragile spires covered with pearls and towers of ancient brick, an androgynous figure wrapped in a massive snake painted as a fluid twisting landscape, and anonymous shapes defined by and containing scenes within scenes. The thinnest of clouds burn off in the light of day. Moon’s works speak as elegant reflections on beauty and aging, the fecundity of the world and the synchronous quality of everyday experience. Men and women pair with animals in many of Moon’s canvases, which often depict men holding lambs with proud love or monkeys present as witnesses or confidants. Animals share our world as they interact with one another. Two pink elephants, their massive forms defined by a delicate swirl of lines, intertwine their trunks in a gesture of solidarity, while hovering enormously above a fertile world of forests and streams. An albino monkey rides luxuriously upon the back of a leviathan rooster. Flamingos and their reflections fill the bluest of skies while an ambiguous red figure sleeps suspended between two trees.

Sleeping figures recur throughout Moon’s work. In one, a woman sleeps in a field of brightly colored flowers, wrapped in a white cover which in turn presents a snow-covered mountain range. Only the figure’s open mouth, a sign of life and breath, breaks the suspension of time, but does little to disturb the painting’s hold on eternity. Equally fantastic, another work features a young man dreaming, oblivious to the jagged broken branches which impale him as he gently grasps to seek their comfort. Our only escape from this dreamer’s frozen time appears in the tiny drips and small dribbles of blood, silently dropping in a landscape of flower petals, tall poplars and a full moon.

Moon’s imagination dwells equally in an actual Asolo, celebrating both the bizarre and the diurnal. Paintings contain clotheslines, the shadows of invisible figures on ancient walls, figures allusive of private lives in Moon’s adopted Asolo. In one painting, fire travels by clothesline; in another, exotic figures traverse lines dividing the sky. Alternatively, Moon’s drawings, paintings, and lithographs portray the straightforward beauty of rural lives — a clear connection from Italy to North Carolina. Like the artist himself, they are spectacular yet humble, profound yet humorous.

Moon has made a unique and eccentric body of work, steadily steering clear of the fads and conformity of his time. His teacher was life, his school imagination and actuality. Although striking as celebrations of the power of imagination, the real measure of his works is in our ability to receive and interact with them. His imagination requires ours. Beyond his skill as a painter, beyond his superb draughtmanship, beyond his strength as a colorist, Moon is creditable above all for orchestrating our contemplation of subjects rich in association and for trusting us to enjoy their mysteries without uncovering them.

Paul R Aho is an artist, teacher, and writer, and is Director of Design and Visual Arts Services for the Palm Beach County Cultural council. 1993