Page 43 - Studio International - March 1968

Concord 1964 Eiger 1965
acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas
50 x 146 in. 80 x 80 in.
Coll: British Council

During 1967 Moon worked on Y-shaped canvases, three joined squares to be read as a more integrated single
exploring the relationship between the three striped form, tended altogether to deprive the central area of
square areas at the arms and the triangle at the centre. tension.
The fact that each of the squares was striped with a The most recent shape is a truncated version of the
different colour suggested a rotating movement of the inverted Y, allowing a maximum incident along the out-
whole canvas, a movement of colour across its surface. line without closing off the central area. 'The cut-down
These paintings are alive where the bands of colour meet version of the three joined squares is the best shape I've
the edges at right-angles so that colour experience runs worked with yet. If you could turn a square inside out
against the shape experience; but where the bands lie and still have something to paint on, I feel it might look
parallel to the edges they appear to reinforce the literal like this' (Moon in Studio International, loc. cit.). With this
shape and thus allow our reading of outline to dominate new shape the areas of maximum incident—the edges
our sensation of colour—allow the life of the paintings to which the bands of colour meet at a right-angle—have
ebb away, as it were, through the three straight edges. been increased in relation to the total outline, and the
Two of this Y series are, to my mind, far more successful edges to which the bands of colour run parallel, being no
than the others. In one the three squares are each painted longer straight, no longer read as framing edges. Where
a different solid colour, and the inner triangle a fourth, so the bands of colour meet the edge of the canvas the
that the integrity of the four primary shapes, as colour, is dialogue between any two colours juxtaposed is of
asserted against the overall literal shape. In the other, sufficient interest in relation to the total life of the paint-
Union, red, blue and yellow stripes on each square ing to divert attention from the fact that an edge has been
respectively are laid over an all-white ground; one tends reached at all. It is this quality, the relative unimportance
to read white, in a situation like this, as ground rather of outline, that saves the best of Moon's new canvases
than colour, space rather than form, so that again the from the danger which has always been present in his
colours assert themselves over the literal shape. paintings: that they should be readable merely as
In a transitional painting, Electric Blue, Moon inverted emblems.
the Y-shape and painted the stripes in relation to the In the first paintings made in this format, two colours
form, parallel with the concave rather than the straight alternate across the canvas and each corner terminates
edges, but this development, although it allowed the with the same colour. Where a third or even fourth colour
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