by Alice Gray

Painter Jim Moon is the consummate artist for all seasons. For more than 40 years, while the winds of fashion have swept up artists into the movement of the day from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 50s to today’s conceptual art -- Moon has consistently explored his unique vision and created exquisitely beautiful paintings in an enchanting style that is technically perfect and purely his own.

Moon has never sought the limelight, but has had success virtually thrust upon him. Working with diligent inspiration in New York, North Carolina, and Asolo, Italy, Moon has attracted collectors and museums from all across the United States and Europe, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Those who buy Moon’s paintings, however, are always eager to claim more than mere patronage: “Jim is my friend,” is the opening remark typical of those who have collected his work. Indeed, Moon is as fascinating as his enigmatic paintings; a conversation with him is as engaging as the exotic animals, mysterious people and fantastical landscapes he brings to life on canvas.

In 1945, at the age of 16, Moon began his career as a painter when he left his hometown of Graham, North Carolina to study at the Cooper Union Institute of Art and Science in New York City. Moon was immediately drawn into the heart of New York’s vibrant art community, and had his first solo exhibition in 1949 at the Norlyst Gallery, one of the leading galleries of the day. After serving with the army in Germany, Moon moved to Italy, where he met art doyenne Peggy Guggenheim, who became a lifelong friend and supporter. Settling in the town of Asolo, in the Veneto region, Moon developed a wide circle of colleagues and collectors in the international art scene.

The influence of Italy and its artistic legacy is obvious in many of Moon’s paintings, which glow with Venetian color, and often include the tile roofs and stone buildings common to the region. In several paintings, Moon also employs the Italian tradition of painting in tondo, or on round canvases, which dates back to the Renaissance. Though the artist returned permanently to North Carolina in 1965, he spent the next 10 summers in Asolo, where he began a summer art-study program for Winston-Salem’s Salem College.

Moon’s teaching experience is as impressive as his success as a professional painter. He has taught at numerous institutions in the United States, and founded the visual arts program at the renowned North Carolina School of the Arts in 1967. Today, Moon is hoping to establish a studio school on his farm in Davidson County, where he is building a Palladian-style house, an Italian sanctuary in his native North Carolina.

Moon’s ties to Florida, both professional and personal, run deep. Moon is a frequent visitor to the state, and had an exhibition of his paintings at the Calvert Gallery in Palm Beach in 1988. His artistic energies have been fed by the beauty of the South Florida coast. A suite of four recent paintings (Moon only titles his works for catalog references) illustrates glimmering pink and white shells on backgrounds of pale blue sky, with soft, white strands of clouds floating through. Viewed side by side, the cloud lines attach to one another, connecting the shells into a single, shimmering image, the way one might recall a series of treasures collected on the beach.

Moon’s painting of a boy on the beach, dating from 1975, may remind viewers of a typically Florida experience: contemplating the magic and mystery of nature by the water’s side. The outline

of the boy’s body straddles a shell-covered beach; his own features are invisible, and the deep blue of the ocean fills half his torso, while the rest is the black of night. Clouds float through his chest and head, and a small moon shines where his heart would be. The painting celebrates the transforming power of nature: the beauty of land, sea, and sky fully absorb both body and mind when one is engrossed by nature. This contemplative mood marks many of Moon’s works, and is an important aspect of his theory about how art is best made and appreciated.

“All creation is achieved in a meditative state,” says Moon. “Art isn’t meant to get the adrenaline going fast. It becomes a reference that enriches the associative pool.”

The identities of the people Moon paints are insignificant, so he often makes them featureless or without expression, whether the figure is a sailor in the lap of a red monkey, a mermaid, a group of boys playing chess or a procession of people on a laundry line. What matters to Moon is that the scene he has created inspires a stream of thoughts or questions for both him and his audience. “I want to start a process of ideas that ends up far from where it began,” he says.

It is difficult not to let the mind wander into the realm of fantasy when looking at a Moon painting. His subject matter seems to spring full-grown from the imagination: a red monkey peering quizzically at the viewer from a rooftop while a couple strolls below; a female figure resting beneath an ocean and sky filled with pink flamingos; a turbaned man leading a camel and elephant into the sea at night; an androgynous figure wrapped in a thick, green snake, with spring flowers blossoming from its mouth.

Because of the dream-like quality of these paintings, Moon has been compared to early 20th- century Surrealists such as Rene Magritte and Georgio de Chirico. But Moon’s fantastical images, unlike those of his European predecessors, are not simply the by-products of dreams, and they resist Freudian analysis. Instead, Moon invites us to explore the regions of the imagination and the emotions, or the work inside the mind, colored by fantasy and feelings.

Moon does not value strictly realistic or life-like art. ‘The attempt to make things photographic is a waste of time,” he asserts. “Painting is an attempt to define the undefinable — happiness, peace, joy, etc. The only important thing is how you feel about things.”

The magical elements in Moon’s recent paintings of Italian towns add humor to his imaginative vision. In one work, a green, cape-clad man rises above rooftops towards a bell-tower; in another, giant snakes wind through houses, laundry lines and across a Venetian canal. “I think this is just what may happen in Venice around three o’clock in the afternoon,” is Moon’s smiling commentary.

Moon wants his paintings to suggest the ironic, amused delight, or caprice, which he extends to all that he portrays. “I think caprice is terribly important.”

According to Moon, such capriciousness is a hallmark of the 17th-century Italian painter Giandomenico Tiepolo, whose work Moon greatly admires. “I like his work,” Moon explains, “because it is so unimportant: gods and goddesses and pretty landscapes. They’re not decorative paintings, but beautiful expressions of beautiful places done without pretension. They’re capricious, too.”

Moon might easily be talking about his own work, for his paintings are also “beautiful expressions of beautiful places” that delight and inspire.

Moon’s paintings have often been described as mythical, but mystical may be a better term. His images illustrate worlds removed from our everyday reality, but they do not propose strict historical or universal truths. The paintings may suggest myths, but there will be as many different myths for each mysterious image as there are viewers. The paintings are not officially titled, in part because Moon doesn’t want to impose any set interpretation on his audience.

The seductiveness of Moon’s paintings springs from this open-endedness: each densely detailed image seems to be telling a story, but the story is whatever we want to see and hear. Moon does acknowledge that “there is a little bit of autobiography in everything,” and like most artists, the experiences he draws upon are chiefly his own. Certainly, the colors and shapes of Moon’s beloved Italian hill towns serve as a background for a number of paintings. But what we make of the images is subjective: the people crossing the top of a laundry line in a painting from 1989, for example, may be headed for the market, for the hereafter, or wherever we wish to imagine sending them.

Moon’s devotion to the free flow of meanings in art will continue to distinguish him as a timeless artist. While most of his generation (and many followers) have pursued abstract art, Moon has expanded the possibilities for representational painting as a medium to express all visionary ideas and emotions.

The clarity of Moon’s color and the expertise of his draughtmanship are rarely seen in contemporary painting. But Moon doesn’t believe that style should conform to prevailing ideas about art’s historical evolution. He dismisses the concept of modernism, which has encouraged artists since Picasso’s time to strive toward greater abstraction, devoid of images, or toward “pure painting.” “There is no moving toward such a universal ideal,” Moon observes, “Humanity isn’t capable of that kind of purity.”

Jim Moon has created an exceptional body of work that celebrates the ageless human capacity to think and feel with imagination. Art audiences around the globe have appreciated and identified with Moon’s mystical worlds, and these exhibitions should only further his recognition as one of our most original and inspired artists.

Alice Gray is a freelance writer, and an editor for Abbeyville Press. She has contributed to Art & Auction and ARTnews magazine, and is the author of a soon to be published essay on Ansel Adams.

Reprinted with kind permission from Palm Beach county Arts, January-February 1992, Volume X/Number 1.