Page 42 - Studio International - March 1968

Jeremy Moon's recent paintings

Charles Harrison

A selection of earlier works
Eclipse 1962
oil on canvas
58½ x 64 in.

Oriole 1962
oil on canvas
54 x 54 in.
Coll: Louis Zelle,
Minneapolis

`I usually have a fairly clear idea when I start a painting Where, with a Pop painter, it is relevant to talk in terms
of how I want it to look when it's finished. But once I of social, cultural or commercial interests, with Moon
start work, the more the painting develops, the more I one is confined to consideration of form and colour and
become aware of the difference between what I planned surface and of what these can be made to do.
to do and what I have actually done. The process of The central preoccupation in Moon's painting has
finishing the picture therefore is to a certain extent a always been, it seems to me, the attempt to use colour
question of coming to terms with what I've actually done meaningfully in a wholly non-representational and
and relinquishing the original conception. The final progressively non-illusionistic context. The shaped can-
stage—getting the picture to work as I want it to—always vases started, with Moon's triangular paintings, from a
goes on longer than I expect. I just keep looking at it and desire to make colour work diagonally, to work across
working on it week by week until I have taken it as far the surface of the painting rather than in relation to an
as I can—which is sometimes too far—then it's finished.' outline which would be read as 'picture' (as opposed to
(Statement by Jeremy Moon in Monad 1, Summer 1964). `painting'). The distinction between picture and painting
This potential difference between the image conceived in Moon's terms of reference was made clear in his
and the image achieved, between the priority of the statement in Studio International in September 1967:
original experience and the priority of the formal resolu- `Always the problem with the shaped canvases has been
tion, brings to Moon's paintings excitement and tension. that if the outside shape of the painting is too complete in
This tension is entirely relevant not so much to the ex- itself it somehow closes off the central area of the picture
periences he is trying to express as to the creative per- and when that happens it's no longer painting for me and
sonality that is trying to express them. The mood of the I'm no longer interested or satisfied.' To use Michael
paintings is absolutely true to the situation in which they Fried's distinction between 'literal shape' (the outline of
are produced. the canvas) and 'depicted shape' (the forms used within
Jeremy Moon is a highly professional painter, dedi- a painting),1 Moon's concern in his non rectilinear
Several of the recent works cated to a very demanding and very unadulterated con- canvases has been to ensure that the literal shape does
illustrated in this article were
ception of painting. Many of the tensions which are most not, by dominating or constricting the_ depicted shape,
exhibited in Jeremy Moon's
important to him are those between different possibilities deprive the surface of life and integrity. The recent
one-man show at the Rowan
Gallery in February. or different interpretations as to what painting really is. paintings achieve this aim pretty consistently.
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