Kelly Moody paints the scene in the window
"All around us are these evidences of order, evidences of beauty..."
A companion to today’s post - apologies for two in one day. I wrote the following article for the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin in the spring of 1993. Candidly, I can’t believe they let me run on as long as I did, but I’m grateful for that.
For an example of Kelly Moody’s paintings, click here.
Copyright ©1993 by Kenyon College. Reprinted with permission.
Several years ago, driving past a shed in the throes of demolition, Kelly S. Moody ’71 stopped to watch, and to collect a souvenir, and, eventually, to invent his own style of painting.
“Among the debris was a wonderful old wooden window that I rescued, not knowing what I was going to do with it,” he recalls. “And one day it occurred to me, ‘Why don't I paint the glass panes with a scene I'd like to see out of my window so I could look at it all the time?’”
Several years later, Moody’s landscapes are drawing increasing numbers of admirers. After three exhibitions of paintings and photographs in his adopted city of Columbus, Ohio, his art has begun to attract national attention.
A native of South Dakota, Moody traveled with his family from Air Force base to Air Force base as he grew up, spending his high-school years in Belgium. During college, he fell into the same pattern: after two years at Tulane University as a premedical student, he departed for a year in Paris at the Sorbonne.
Although he says he had no specific reason for going to Paris, be cites the experience as a seminal one. “It turned out to be the greatest year of my lie, and it moved me in the direction I'm still going.
“In Paris, the bohemian life felt natural: writing, playing guitar, hanging out in jazz caves - living the kind of life in which the arts really became central to my way of thinking. And that's never really changed since then.”
His year abroad led him away from the study of medicine to become an English major, a decision that in turn led him to Kenyon. Having returned to the United States to enroll at Ohio State University in Columbus, where his father was then stationed, Moody learned of Kenyon's English department. He spent his junior and senior years in Gambier, and though brief, Moody says, his time at the College was “very significant.”
“I think the combination of the intellectual stimulation and the magical apartness that Kenyon is for me, added up to a great deal of freedom - philosophical freedom. But with it came a sense of responsibility.” Counting down a list of half a dozen influential teachers, he recalls a “concentration of excellent minds that were there, and the sense of personal inquiry.
“There was a great deal of personal exploration, which was sometimes not much fun, bur which ultimately was very rewarding - and, personally, it was very necessary.”
It included, however, no art training. In fact, though he has practiced art throughout his life, Moody has never had any formal art education. He was thus surprised by the interest displayed by James and Timothy Keny, owners of the Keny Gallery in Columbus, when they so a few of his paintings and photographs. The Kenys believed his work had enough merit to encourage his development and subsequently to arrange a one-person show in November 1987. “I thought if I was going to have an artistic break-through,” he says, “it would be in music or in writing. Their encouragement was really a catalyst to me.”
Since that first show, Moody has had two subsequent exhibitions at the Keny Gallery, the latest in the spring of 1992. More recently, his reputation has begun to extend beyond the local spotlight. In January, he was invited to submit paintings for a show of contemporary American representational painters by the Swan Coach House, a gallery sponsored by Atlanta's High Museum of Art.
Employing window frames as his canvas came to him almost by chance, but Moody says the idea holds enough appeal to him that he intends to keep it as a constant throughout his career, as something of a signature. As he explained in the artist's statement for his first show, the device fosters “the tentative belief that the scene portrayed actually exists on the other side of the wall.” The trompe l’oeil also works metaphorically, he says, manifesting art as “a window through which one sees the world in a particular or new way, a window through which one sees glimpses of the artist's inner self.”
The device recalls one of Moody) favorite artists, Rene Magritte, and in technique, too, the influence of the French surrealist seems apparent. The words Moody uses to describe Magritte’s style - “so clean, and orderly” - could be applied to his own paintings.
Moody eschews the term surrealist for himself, however. “I don't want to rearrange the world,” he says, “but I want to capture it in a way that reveals or suggests the beauty and the mystery and the power that is around us - to see the world as it is, but in a special light, at special moments.” As Columbus Dispatch art critic Jacqueline Hall put it, “Moody’s landscapes have a striking look of suspended animation. Even the huge, luminous skies, intricately patterned with clouds, seem caught in the spell cast over the land.”
Hall called “inescapable” the influence of nineteenth-century American painters such as George Inness and Ralph Blakelock, a comparison Moody welcomes. In Moody’s landscapes, the human world is often incidental, if it appears at all, visible only in the lines of a planted field or the window that frames the scene. The absence of the manmade is basic to one of his primary concerns in creating images.
“A fundamental part of man's being is our separation from nature, ever since we began to think,” Moody explains. “And I think that's fundamental to our philosophy, our religion: man's search for truth leans upon this alienation.” So his paintings, like those of Inness and Blakelock, attempt to present nature as a “palpable symbol” of the power and beauty of the world. “My hope is that, by connecting the viewer to the world around us, maybe I can decrease some of that alienation,” he explains.
If Moody's paintings look outwardly for beauty, seeking it in the totality of a natural vista, his photographs find it in the details of the human landscape.
“I didn't want to do in my photography what I was already doing in my painting,” he says. “The medium - the camera - is all about framing, about composition.” Moody’s photographs tend to present architectural details, corners and doorways that might go unnoticed in the context of an entire street.
“The symmetry, the balance in line, color, texture, shape - it seems limitless,” he explains. “All around us are these evidences of order, evidences of beauty that have to do with the particular rather than the overall - the geometry that we don’t see because it's lost in the overall.” In both his paintings and his photographs, Moody seeks to work on a number of planes - a visual plane, certainly, but an intellectual one as well.
“I see things naturally as an English major,” he says. “I think in terms of allegory and metaphor, and I think a lot of the kinds of questions that get posed in the literature we love and admire are the same questions I try to deal with in both my painting and my photography. When I am considering a composition or a subject matter, the consideration of that subject matter is inseparable from how I view it metaphorically. I can't separate one from the other.
“I’m always dealing with a reason for the painting, and some process that goes on in the viewer's mind, that can be appreciated on more than one level.”
And yet, Moody hastens to add, the visual image is important on its own terms. “It's such a powerful form of communication: it's so immediate and accessible. And, frankly, I hope my paintings are perceived as beauty. I'm interested in adding beauty to the world.
"If I can capture that perfect light of day, that's what I'm after - that mystical moment that is real enough to be believed,” he says.
Making the jump from painting for his own enjoyment to producing works for a show has, Moody says, brought added pressures, not just of output but also of discipline.
“You know you're going to be seen by a critical audience,” notes Moody. “It forces you to work harder, and larger, and to become a harsher critic of yourself. It’s a pressure I welcome. I’d have to say that art has become, for me, the most important definition of who I am.”
Not yet ready to rely on art for his bread, however, Moody has kept his day job - or, perhaps, his fall, winter, and spring job - teaching French and coaching soccer at the Columbus Academy, a preparatory school in suburban Gahanna, Ohio. Though he began in the position as a result of what he calls “fortunate timing - they were looking for a French teacher, and I was looking for a career” - Moody says he has found it “a natural and a satisfying profession. For a restless person like me, I can't believe that I'm still doing it after twenty years.”
The combination of his two careers has perhaps evolved into a symbiotic relationship. Teaching, he says, has allowed him large blocks of time to pursue interests in art, music, writing, and travel, and his interests in the arts have in turn allowed him continually to move in new directions, in contrast to the cyclical nature of teaching. Moreover, he says, he cannot separate the influences of his two careers.
“I think that, as a teacher, you can’t help but on a daily basis live with the larger questions all of us face - what are we, why are we, where have we been, and where are we going. And also, on a personal level, how do we find a sense of fulfillment. I have to think that we're all looking for an understanding that allows us to feel that our lives have meaning, that we're contributing somehow.
“[Former Kenyon English professor] Bob Cantwell used to quote poet Robert Creeley, who said, ‘Only connect.’ That idea has stayed with me and has always been a kind of personal challenge.”