Page 44 - Studio International - March 1968

is introduced into this shape, as in No. 12, No. 18 or .No.
19, the problem of maintaining the integrity of the surface
becomes acute. To render the image readable and con-
ceivable only as a whole and flat unit while still employ-
ing an asymmetrical balance of colour requires not merely
a carefully controlled relationship between colour and
colour, but an exact relationship. This relationship has
to be achieved in the face of a wide range of tempting
alternatives. There is the temptation, for instance, to
open the painting to the wrong allusions. It is crucial to
the nature of the statements he is making that Moon
should never allow colour to be anything but abstract,
and that it should never encourage associations in elevant
to the experience he is trying to render. This is perhaps
one reason why he uses so much yellow, the most abstract
of the primary colours; we are not tempted to read
yellow as representational in the way we are tempted to
read blue as sea or sky or associate its use with memories
of one or the other. It is perhaps relevant to mention here
that Moon paints his canvases on a horizontal surface,
laid flat across a trestle.
Untitled 1965
acrylic on canvas An ingratiating premature resolution of the painting
77 x 67 in. may offer another temptation. It can't be easy for the
painter to work away from a seductive image toward one
which is less immediately accessible; the fact that Jeremy
Moon has obviously felt the need to do so in the case of
certain pictures raises many interesting questions. He is
plainly interested, as a painter like Kenneth Noland is
not, in a paint surface which is physically substantial.2 In
No. 18, perhaps the most complex painting in Moon's
recent exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, four colours are
employed: yellow, alternating with pale green, pink and
pale blue. Each corner ends with a different colour so
that the same rotating movement is implicit as in the
Y-shaped paintings. I first saw this canvas at an early
stage. Each of the colours had been laid in with only one
coat of paint and the painting looked finished—highly
seductive, full of life, the paint hardly more than staining
Right Petrouchka 1964 the very attractive surface which cotton duck presents to
acrylic on canvas
66 x 77 in. the eye. Jeremy Moon himself seemed highly suspicious
of the painting and of the speed at which it had appeared
Below, Jeremy Moon in his to reach a satisfactory state, accustomed to see his paint-
studio
ings emerge as the end product of a tense and exacting
period of concentration and redefinition. Intellectual and
manual control over the process of painting are im-
portant for him, and this means that he has tended to view
painting, at the working stage, as a process of realization
rather than revelation. We have had no Jackson Pollock
in Europe to illustrate how rapidly sensation can become
paint or how inseparable, at the ultimate point, the two
become; and Moon sees himself, I think, as very much
part of a European tradition in which Matisse was the
last great landmark.
The next time I saw the large four-colour painting it
had changed totally; not in colour, but in intensity and
in its implication. Four or five coats of paint had been
added; the edges were sharper; the whole painting stood,
as it were, further off. The image at which the painting
was aimed had been more distant, more self-contained
and more precise than I had understood.
The tension between the image which offers itself
spontaneously and the image which the painter is