Marjorie Moeser

The very warm and colourful fall of last November in New Mexico lured me outdoors. I returned to plein air painting and found that later in the studio, the outdoor images stayed with me. These landscape paintings lean heavily on images that I walk by daily, that I see through my kitchen window or that I drive by in the process of a day. My morning walks take me through pecan groves, along levies that parallel acequias (water ditches), or along dry riverbeds. Most days are crystal clear. I look out across vast open fields toward the mountains, on one side and toward pecan groves on another. Sunrises and sunsets are warm and intense. To express the intensity of light-dark contrasts I sometimes scratch or carve through built-up painted layers to convey not only the rhythms of the land surface; but also the exaggerated sense of 3D, as in a bas relief.

As a colourist, my palette keeps expanding. Mine is often a full spectrum palette. Shadows shout out in deep purples, alizarin crimson, shimmering blues and subtle complementary mixes. Skies remain expansive, often swirled through by clouds. Lenticular bands of clouds are quite common; and only in seeing them as they stretch and elongate themselves with subtle shadows at their bases can one truly know that they are not imaginary. Moonlight found its way into my painting. Out in the country at night, the sky is quite wondrous. When the full moon hits the open fields, the fields come alive, rippling with reflected colour, like moving water. The glow emanating from the moonlight is magical. I allowed myself to use colour schemes of non-ordinary colours to create the world of fantasy… a Shangri La. Mango orange, a colour lush and juicy as the name suggests, finds its way into this mellowness in the sky that a combination of dawns, sunsets and moonrises seemed to evoke.

My landscapes are not intended to be specific places. Elements in Nature are treated semi-abstractly to suggest different type locales… valleys, fields, wherever… The element of fantasy that comes through in a seemingly imaginary colour scheme is intentional and meant to transport the viewer to the Edge of Somewhere.