Double Cluster 2008 Acrylic on Canvas 481Ú2" x 32"
Photo: courtesy JayJay Gallery

Joan Moment's work is simultaneously intimate and vast in scale. Her ambition is to link the cosmic and the microscopic-"things both visible and invisible"-in processes as familiar as scraping and finger-painting. She finds remarkable visual connections in how things look- "animate or inanimate, sea or sky"-in paintings that evoke nature's overall embrace of her and her creative process. Moment's works can suggest images, sometimes quite literally, yet she doesn't really depict any specific subject. Built by pouring layers of thinned acrylics, which she calls "paint water," her surfaces evoke the sea, the night sky, or landscapes seen through clouds from an airplane; their composition is an uncertain process that Moment compares to alchemy. The recent Alchemical Interactions "was the hardest painting-I really had no idea it was going to evolve the way it did. I could never know as I poured white or amber how it would dry." She's inspired by a sense of penetrating the universe, which unfolds and emerges as she works. "What I love about these surfaces is the way they relate to nature."

Back-to-back exhibitions, at LIMN Gallery in San Francisco and at JayJay in Sacramento, provide a chance to appreciate the varied effects Moment achieves by her simple processes. Some works resemble photos from the Hubble space telescope, with dots of white on either black or dark blue grounds. Looking more closely one finds in the poured surfaces both cloud-like swirls suggesting nebulae-Moment likes to point out that astronomers refer to them as "star nurseries"-and small bursts of red, blue and yellow applied with her fingertips: the colors of stars at different stages of their lives. Other paintings present circles made by printing with a cup dipped in paint, whose empty outlines, like bubbles floating on a microscope slide, randomly join together in primitive cellular organizations.

The show at LIMN includes earlier works in which Moment dipped nasturtium leaves in paint to print leaf forms with comet-like tails. "I drag the paint with a plastic bevel-edged scraper and spray it with water to disperse the paint as evenly as possible, and to further dilute the pigment." In others, on a predominantly yellow ground, Moment fills in the circles to make discs of bright colors, which in Tiddlywinks II she applies playfully over the drifting background pigments. While such works introduce an element of pure, abstract form, Moment sees her paintings as consistently referential; informed by the directness of process-shaped, like the universe, by the pull of gravity-they represent things in the way that footprints or ripples in sand convey the impression of physical force.

In this sense, Moment feels an affinity to the recent "flow" painting practiced by Andy Moses, Suzan Woodruff and other Southern Californians, yet her work has evolved over a career too long, wide and complex to be subsumed into any particular school. Her colored discs, for example, which enable "separate realities" to coexist with the underlying flow, acknowledge the East Coast influence of Ross Bleckner. Much earlier, though, in a 1973 show at the Whitney Museum in New York, Moment used similar dots to make images inspired by aboriginal paintings from Australia. The scope of her vision thus ranges through time and space, moving from primitivism to post-modernism, just as her scale shifts from microcosm to macrocosm. Moment points out that she was born near the sea in Connecticut, and that her images of landscapes seen from the air are literally inspired by transcontinental travel (she came to Sacramento in 1971). One special pleasure of her works is to read in them the visual accretions of her career, which, on its own scale, is as long and multi-layered as the world of her paintings.


Joan MomentŐs work can currently be seen at LIMN Gallery in San Francisco from July 25 - September 12, 2009, and at JayJay Gallery in Sacramento from September 9 - October 24, 2009