CORNWALL—The Cornwall Library, 30 Pine St., will present Ellen Moon’s “Thinking About Gardens,” an exhibition of her watercolors of private Cornwall gardens, Saturday, June 14, through Saturday, Aug. 16. There will be an artist’s reception on June 14.
The exhibition also features two of her jackets elaborately embroidered with botanical themes. All of the work on exhibit is for sale. And because “Thinking About Gardens” coincides with Books & Blooms (June 20 and 21), the library’s annual two-day garden-related event and benefit, it offers an opportunity for gardeners and art lovers to celebrate summer together in rural Cornwall.
Moon says “For me, painting has become a form of meditation, an hour in the day when I have to concentrate on one thing and one thing only…”
A few years ago, she began the project that resulted in the contemplative watercolors in this exhibit, painting the grand gardens of Cornwall, many of them featured on Books & Blooms garden tours.
She says, “What a pleasure it is to sit in these beautiful spaces and paint ‘en plein air.’ I began to expand my thinking about what constitutes a garden. There are many sorts–formal, botanical, cottage, vegetable, herb–even a path through the woods is a kind of garden. My current working definition of a garden is a human intervention in the landscape to enhance human appreciation of the landscape.”
Moon says of her her embroidered jackets, “I like to tell stories. In my jackets, I am reporting on some of the daily phenomena that I have witnessed in the world around me–butterflies n the mist, the surprising beauty of a spider’s web, light and shadow in a field, the lively round of life and death in the pond.”
This show displays two works in fiber: crocheted, knitted, dye-painted and hand-embroidered art to wear. One is a jacket embroidered with spring flowering trees and shrubs and their pollinators, including the wind; the other is a kimono inspired by Yeats’s “The Song of the Wandering Aengus.”
After graduating from Connecticut College, she received an MA in drawing and an MFA in multimedia from the University of Iowa. Since then, she has exhibited works in watercolor and fiber in many venues. She has also designed masks and costumes for theatrical groups, and taught mask-making workshops. Recently she has become very interested in giant puppets.
Moon lives in Cornwall, where she was a weekly storyteller to the first grade at Cornwall Consolidated School, and art curator for the Cornwall Library. She now serves as a central force for the annual Rose Algrant Art Show, an exhibit of works in all media by Cornwall artists.