Marjorie Moeser

Artist Statement

My current work is a continuation of my artistic concerns including recently developed techniques that allow me to enrich the painted surface with heavy textures overlaid with vibrant colours. The rectangle is still at the heart of my compositions, but now these are freer forms intuitively developed as the painting evolves. Strict right angles are no longer requisite.

My paintings are about time and constant change. I am interested in erosion and continuity, especially as I see this in the environment, the architecture and the people around me. I see the beauty in Nature as an enduring force despite time and change. This beauty is expressed through my colour harmonies. Erosion is portrayed through roughened surfaces rubbed with colour, patina-like, which tends to expose, as it were, the underlying surfaces. The more I look at and study landscape, architecture and people, the more I learn about this erosion. My recent sojourns in the Chihuahuan desert area has served to convince me even more of the multiplicity of Nature’s faces and her capacity for beauty.

As a painter, I have always been concerned with the picture plane as window; and the real versus illusion. This window concept enables me to play with colour and form, texture and light in such a way as to create illusionary depth within the picture plane. For a number of years now, I have been investigating processes with mixed media, using an additive and subtractive method, building up and scraping away of surfaces, along with layering and veiling of colour. Transparency and layering work together not only to heighten this piercing of the picture plane; but also to create along with my use of built-up textures and shifting forms a sense of movement between what is real and what is not. I have extended this concept by sometimes using collage or what I call trompe-collage as part if my repertoire. This approach fulfills my aim to portray time and change reality versus illusion.

Marjorie Moeser, October 2007