Historic Patterns 2018

Terri Kelly Moyers painted this portrait of a young woman, wrapped in a blanket, sometime in the late 20th or early 21st century. The way the blanket folds and drapes around the young woman’s shoulders, falling down around her figure, gives the work a real sense of depth. Moyers' use of thin paint layers to depict the folds of the blanket is quite clever. She builds up a feeling of volume with subtle gradations in color and tone. The texture isn’t exactly concealed, but the smooth surface of the paint makes it feel less tangible. It’s as if the artist wants us to see the blanket, and perhaps by extension the young woman, as a symbol or idea, rather than as a physical object. In a way, that resonates with the patterns drawn on the walls behind her, which appear to be pictographs from an earlier time. Like Elizabeth Peyton, Moyers feels to me like an artist interested in the conversation between the real and the ideal. The painting embraces ambiguity rather than offering any fixed meanings.