Resilient women
CRAYOLAS AND CHAMELEONS LAUNCH AN ‘ UPLIFTING’ ART CAREER
Nancy Moore’s “Unconventional Women” inhabit a borderland between fantasy and myth.
They levitate. They merge with trees. They grow flowers instead of hair. Those who are warriors ride chimerical beasts. One called “Fearless” is mounted on a feathered bear with a beaded reptilian tail.
They aren’t fearsome, though. The Ridgefield artist intends them to project strength and if their vivid costuming seems to have a coloring book quality, it’s because crayon and colored pencil are among the mediums she uses.
Her women also have a surprising origin. Moore says they are descended from chameleons — the kind she painted for her long- running 2006 exhibit, that also included frogs and turtles, at the Environmental Sciences Center at Yale’s Peabody Museum.
“I think women are chameleons. Women are adapters,” she says. “We have to be, according to where we find ourselves. We have so many different roles in our lifetimes. We’re always shedding our skin and growing new skin.”
Moore is self- taught. Her transition to exhibiting artist began late in her career as a book editor, mainly for Yale University Press, when she decided to act on the long- held notion to write books of her own. Instead, after reading the book, “The Artist’s Way,” for inspiration and acquiring a full
set of Crayola crayons that reminded her of childhood passion, she painted her first chameleon. She called it “Self- Portrait” and remembers it as the first piece she sold at a show.
“That was all the encouragement I needed to keep going,” she says. She painted more chameleons ( usually known for changing colors) and eventually gave some women’s heads, then hands. “Finally, I just went full woman,” she says. “I still have that piece, and she’s called ‘ Survivor.’ She’s been shown a lot. You can see the tail in her dress. I just morphed her completely into a woman.”
Metamorphosis is what Moore does with her “Unconventional Women.” She says that when she began the series about eight years ago “the idea that beauty is not conventional and comes from inside” attracted her. Lately, she’s been trying to show joy and women’s resilience.
Just before the coronavirus forced it to close, the Westport Library was to have an exhibit of six newer “Unconventional Women.” “Uplift,” the image the library chose for the cover of its bimonthly bulletin, shows a young woman with clenched fists who has made a gravity defying leap into the clouds. Her garments are intricately patterned and she bears a greenhouse of flowers on her head.
As unique as she is, “Uplift” actually began as an amalgam of images Moore mined from the library she’s amassed of magazines, newspapers, books on textiles and gardening catalogs. “Uplift’s” face is borrowed from a Vogue model, her posture from a newspaper photo of a child dancing, her garments from Iranian textile patterns. None are direct copies though.
“I play fast and loose with what I’m looking at. I add my own colors,” Moore says. Her changes create a teasing taxonomy for the viewer. “They are fantastical renderings. It makes you look a second time and ask, ‘ What is that?’ I’m the boss I get to do that.”
One of the most conventional of Moore’s women is “Wonder Girl,” who at least appears tethered to the earth. But her skirt is made of leaves and the bunch of carrots she holds in one hand seems to have sprouted a butterfly. Circling her head is a constellation of candy corn fireflies. She might be in paradise except her pale skin shows bruising around her neck and eyes.
“I think that’s a haunting image for me,” Moore says, comparing it to other women. The original came from a National Geographic article about a religious sect in Oklahoma. “Wonder Girl” won the juror’s choice award at the New Britain Museum of American Art’s 2018 regional Nor’easter exhibition.
Midway between the airborne “Uplift” and the grounded “Wonder Girl” is the woman who merely levitates in the painting titled, “I Am So Much More.” Her billowing dress shelters layers of snails, butterflies and birds. She wears a golden crown. The original image came from an impoverished girl pictured in an ad for a non- profit institution.
“I wanted to make her more than her circumstance. I put a crown on her and dressed her in nature … so she’s no longer dressed in tatters,” Moore says.
“I Am So Much More” took first place in the Ridgefield Guild of
Artists 2017 annual juried show and was later exhibited in small group shows at the Silvermine Arts Center and at the Susan Eley Fine Arts gallery in New York.
Moore still paints the occasional chameleon. Last year, she had a beauty titled “Life Force” in a show at the Terrain gallery in Westport. Mostly orange and yellow with highlights of purple and green, it clings to a tree limb, entwined in an exo- skeleton of branches. The sky in the background shifts from day time white clouds to a night filled with confetti stars.
A detail easily missed is that the chameleon’s coiled tail seems to have sprung a leak and is spawning its own confetti stars. Such permeable boundaries are a shared trait of both her chameleons and women, and another of her informing themes.
“We’re all just a membrane away from our surroundings,” Moore says. “The sky comes into their ( her women) bodies. It shows how resilient and also fragile we are.”
Moore expects the Westport Library will still exhibit her “Unconventional Women,” but the timing depends on the library’s reopening. “The show will go on,” she says. “It has to.”