Life! Isn’t it all just so short—and what the heck’s up with that? Or is it that life is in fact very
long? Unending sequence of moments, boundless and ever fresh, each turn an utter surprise,
each one a shock. All the unique opportunities, all the unique risks. Life, ever new, ever shifting
and reinvented: there lie the joy and the mystery and the grief.
Or: life as a series of cycles, of cycles within cycles, of recurrent emotions, familiar images and
second and third chances, déjà vu upon déjà vu upon déjà vu upon déjà vu… Life as a learning
curve, life familiar and recognizable, life as a structure that builds sequentially, like animated
film. Talk about joy and mystery and grief!
Or, of course, all of the above.
In the painting “SEE? 1.3” from Sandy Moore’s beautiful sequence Life is Long Life is Short, the first thing
I notice is the arm of a child, pudgy and cute. The child supports itself on a bed of spiky grass;
it must be learning to crawl, for there are its haunches and another arm, reaching forward
toward a multicolored sphere or toy. Above the child’s shoulders sit two connected circles which I
recognize from my ophthalmologists’ office: the globes of the eyes, complete with lenses and cornea
and joined at the back anatomically, the whole ocular structure. These are images conceived by an MD, after all.
SEE? See more. See the clouds floating blithely across the big blue luscious world, see the
echoing of eye shapes and cloud shapes and butt shapes. Notice a third arm in the painting,
then a fourth, this one stretching back to catch something round. See how the whole
composition remains in motion, how it turns, a realm of roiling discovery. See?
Now see two other paintings, “SEE? 2.3” and “SEE? 3.3.” See that here too are the clouds and
the eyes and the grass and the toddler, once again crawling, exploring. But here the grass has
grown long, while there it turns gray, as if dusted with frost. In one frame the clouds sparkle
over seas flecked with glorious whitecaps; in the next they fall greenly above a world jauntily
akimbo. Still the trustful arms reach out, still the eyes look and discover.
This is the world of Moore’s elegant and provocative sequence, a work which continually
regenerates, image by image. Thirty-four paintings, each standing alone, lovely thin veils of
color and illumination. Yet each painting nevertheless tilts toward the others, sharing and
conversing. Images variously dreamily untethered or hilariously referential, as in the sudden
appearance of Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat (Moore’s also an animator, after all). Sometimes
there are numbers or quotes from the great modernists; sometimes the political and the
personal rise like the tides. The whole gently urging us to simply see, to simply think.
In the most series’ abstract works, for example, the four paintings in the Bardo series, a single
large sphere or circle recurs. Perhaps this is planetary, perhaps it’s molecular; at times it seems
to be in motion. At one point the circle resolves into a kind of cartoon eye before presumably
evolving further, in images not captured here, for by now we’re thinking about breadth and
circularity. We’ve noticed that structurally, Life is Long Life is Short offers us three repeating
cycles—three Lives, it turns out—composed of nine key stages each.
But three cycles can’t be the end of it, can they? The bardo is ongoing, the piece seems to say,
and in each successive image we see those circles bubble up, inflecting the more narrative
scenes of bodies and cats, skeletons and organs and clouds and, of course, eyes. Further
scenes, further shapes, further colors and ideas stretch out beyond these, forward and
backward, pictorial and abstract, a few even constructivist. Ever shifting, ever in flux.
Reincarnation offers comfort, as Moore has pointed out. But there are hitches, she says too,
and in the crossing of those notions we find the heart of this stimulating and complex work. For
me, that’s where the pleasure smolders most fully. It’s not so much in being persuaded beyond
doubt, for Moore is too thoughtful and generous for that, but rather in being invited to weigh
the shape, the feel and nature of life. To be prompted to see and think and imagine as
ambitiously, as elegiacally—and yeah, as hopefully—as Moore does herself.
Dave King
