In the studio of Malcolm Moran
Malcolm Campbell Moran is not a name widely known in art circles, and that’s a pity. Although his work has been shown in some major galleries in the Northeast, most recently at the Barn gallery in north Stamford, many people, even those conversant with the art scene, are not familiar with his work. Perhaps that’s because Moran works on so many different planes. One day he will be sketching with a pencil, another day his inspiration takes root in a charcoal drawing.
The Barn hung a few of his collages set as shadow boxes in its July show. He delves into oil painting and painting on Plexiglass, printmaking and sculpture.
While he has been drawing since he was a kid, Moran took roads as far from art as could be: driving a cab, building offshore oil platforms, banking, running a family owned printing business in New Orleans. Today, art is his world.
Moran’s studio is in a converted garage studio that you reach down the narrow staircase from the kitchen of his 1800s Colonial in Greenwich. You traipse through two office rooms crammed with books and computers so you are quite unprepared for the incredible theater of artistic life before you in his studio. On the floor, paintings, drawings, and prints lean against walls and cabinets. Scattered on an oversize white countertop is a remarkable assortment of sketch books and notebooks; brushes, paints and jars of ink; charcoal, coloring and lead pencils; and X- Acto blades. Panes of Plexiglass are lined up against a supporting beam. A printing press sits at the far end of the countertop.
Shelves of books comprise one wall, with shelves of everything else on other walls. An expanse of windows lets in plenty of light even when filtered by a stand of trees outside. In front of the windows are cabinets with drawers jammed with fragments of newspapers and magazines, including gum wrappers, a jumble of material that he dips into from time to time for his collages.
One would think that a dozen artists are at work here. Actually, that in a way explains the complexity of the man. His artistic output reflects so many interests. He’s fascinated by biblical narratives, for example, particularly the story of Tobit, his son Tobias and the angel Raphael. ( The angel in his painting looks more like Tinker Bell than the cherubs painted on the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.)
He paints saints such as St. Sebastian and saints he has known in real life like Selina, his “second mother.” He paints faces of his friends and sometimes his artistic inclinations have to do with dreams, like the one of a man’s face, someone he says he does not recognize. His themes are repeated endlessly as he searches to express the “soul” of each subject.
A palm tree, a goat, a boat, a friend’s face take root in the creative niche of his brain and he can’t seem to let them go.
“An image,” he says, “may take years to work out of my system.”
The boat looks like one a father would take his 5- year- old son out on the Sound to fish for fluke. The one that fascinates Moran is a “currach,” an Irish fishing vessel whose design has not changed in a thousand years. On a monthlong artist retreat years ago overlooking the ocean in western Ireland, Moran became intrigued with the currach. He has painted the boat so many times and he still hasn’t found out what that boat is saying to him.
As a way of explaining his dilemma, Moran begins by saying that while he has literal content in his work, he also has a good deal of abstraction as well.
“I want to find the thing in the boat that makes the boat the boat,” he explains, “something that makes it deep and something meaningful to me and if I can get that on a piece of paper, then quite often it will resonate with someone else.”
Look at the horse and rider that appear repeatedly in his work. They emanate from an incident in his early childhood in Mexico. One day he went riding with his brothers and a cowboy when the horse bolted and galloped across the Sonoran Desert. Moran held on for dear life until the horse suddenly stopped to eat berries off a cactus plant. The child, to use Moran’s words, “communed with the horse,” so much so that Moran wanted to taste those berries himself but worried about getting off and back on the horse. The theme of such perseverance to “gain control” is repeated endlessly in his work.
Typically, Moran begins with a sketch and sometimes, he admits, he likes the sketch more than the painting. He’ll move from one medium to another with ease. One fascination had him assembling scraps of paper in a collagelike assembly that he painted over and then mounted each canvas in 3- D wooden boxes. Think shadow boxes behind a glass face.
At 70, he has the demeanor of a much younger man. He views life tempered with humor, someone who is comfortable wearing glasses with round vintage yellow frames picked up in Fabulous Fanny’s in New York City. More often his conversations are serious: the difficulty of really good printmaking, Christianity and Malachi Martin, Turkey, the Bible, the diversity of cultures in New Orleans where he grew up, da Vinci, music composition ( his son is a composer), love of gardening (“look at these jasmines”) and Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules of Life.”
You leave his studio humbled.