AN ‘OLD-FASHIONED PAINTER’
The “Shutdown Throwdown” exhibit currently online at the Rowayton Arts Center has more than 200 entries created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A quick scroll/stroll through the virtual gallery suggests a preponderance of abstract paintings, followed by photography and landscapes. Realistically rendered people are generally absent.
So what won Best in Show? It was an outlier: a traditional oil portrait of a pensive young woman titled “Change in Plans” by Wendy Moore, who does not mind declaring her own age, which is 77.
“I was shocked, just shocked when I won,” she says. “I thought ‘Here I am, an old-fashioned painter. I’m the old lady,” she says. “Many artists are eager to express ideas, about themselves, about their voice. I’m not conceptual. I’m looking for the experience, of how I can be one with what I’m painting.”
Moore is not being dismissive of her fellow artists. She has a long association with the RAC and has been an exhibiting member of both the Old Greenwich Art Society and the Carriage Barn Art Center. She’s more marveling at her own differences.
For one, she did not seek formal art training until 20 years ago and when she did she went to the Ridgewood Art Institute in New Jersey. Founded in 1935, the institute emphasizes realism in painting and drawing, and explicitly extolls the importance of beauty in fine art. Moore still returns there, drawn to a north lit studio. It neutralizes the changing effects of direct sunlight. “The north lit aspect is the magic of it,” she says. “I go there to paint in that silvery light. It puts you in touch with some sort of deeper quality.”
Another difference is that if Moore embraces traditional art values, she also links painting to her 40-year practice of Zen meditation. In fact, she paints at a Zen monastery for lay people in Pound Ridge, N.Y., where she says she’s lucky enough to be caretaker.
She discovered Zen in 1976, after moving from California to Westport and taking a Tai Chi class at the Westport YMCA taught by a Zen master. Now, she teaches Tai Chi herself at the YWCA and YMCA in Greenwich and Lapham Community Center in New Canaan. She speaks of her painting as an extension of Zen and conflates her growth as a painter with her personal growth.
“It all works together,” she says. “I didn’t think of doing it (her prize painting) to compete, but because I’m so interested in portraits and what I’m gaining using principles I studied in terms of human form and expression. There’s a moment you want to catch. It’s a look.”
At the Ridgewood Institute, she concentrated on landscapes, successfully selling many, but tackled portraits only three years ago. She finds her models there and has done portraits of a bare-chested, tattooed man who could belong to the Aryan Brotherhood and of a clothed woman lounging odalisque-like on a divan. The models typically sit for three hours, changing poses every 20 minutes. “They go through things in their head, just like we would,” Moore says.
The model for the painting that became “Change in Plans” looked in her 20s and sat in a blue chair old enough to have come from a vintage consignment shop. Moore says she executed the basic portrait in a single session, working directly with oil and brush, massing colors to get light, shadow and shape. “You don’t draw,” she says. “I got it down to where I knew I could work on it on my own.”
This was several months ago, before the pandemic. She took it back to Pound Ridge and let it sit.
“I kept going back to it, looking at it, thinking I really want to finish it. There was something about her pose. I thought it had this feeling of thinking things over. That something is going on,” she says.
After the call came for the “Shutdown” exhibit, she spent 15 more hours working on it. “I did the hands over and over again,” she says. “They say (John Singer) Sargent wiped off things as many as 80 times. I would wipe paint out and do it again… I actually made her face slightly different, where I caught the part of the pose that would express something about now, and how it would effect young people.”
The finished portrait shows the young woman leaning forward, one hand supporting her chin, the other draped over a leg. She wears black boots, the toes turned inward, and black leggings, so worn her knee caps shine through, matching the exposed flesh of her upper arms. Her blond hair has brown roots.
Moore says the portrait may have made the model look older than she actually was. “Maybe I didn’t it well enough to show her youth,” she says. But she thinks she knows why it succeeds.
“I’m dealing with universal emotions in the classical traditional sense. It comes through in people. She’s paused. We’re all paused.”
Whether intended or not, Moore’s portrait captures more than someone weighed down by their thoughts. It captures the woman’s physicality. She may be young, but her body and face bear the weight of age. She’s not just paused, she’s mortal, as the pandemic reminds us we all are.
Moore grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In college, at Stanford, she majored in English but started to study comparative religion after having a spiritual experience that expressed itself physically. She has three grown children and has worked as a landscape designer.
As a child she liked to draw imaginary portraits. She says she decided to study art seriously after seeing an exhibit at the Cavalier gallery in Greenwich by the landscape painter John Phillip Osborne. He would become her first instructor.
“I stood in this room and I saw these paintings and I felt something. I was on the verge of tears,” she says. A barn landscape had special impact. “It reminded me of when I was a kid in California, riding through the countryside. My parents had a convertible. I was maybe 5 years old. I remember the smell of alfalfa in the valley. But the (Osborne) painting was in Vermont. It was the way he captured the light.”