John Moyers’ upcoming solo exhibition at Maxwell Alexander Gallery, titled Ribbons of Light, serves as something of a homecoming.
“I moved recently, and I wasn’t able to paint for about four months, so it’s really exciting just to get painting again,” Moyers says.
When gallery director Beau Alexander approached him about doing a solo show this spring, Moyers saw it as an opportunity to play with a wide variety of ideas. “In the past I’ve done shows where there was a special theme, but this one has really been doing whatever I want,” he says. “It’s really going to be all over the map.”
Clouds Growing Fast, oil, 24 x 30 in.
After 50 years as an artist, he’s still looking for ways to challenge himself. “Sometimes I’ll start a piece and I feel like I can do better, or sometimes I might get a better idea, so I’ll take it in a different direction,” he says.
Moyers considers himself primarily an outdoor painter. “I have done a lot of painting trips, especially in the fall, and even my studio work is based on the outdoor work,” he says. Every landscape depicted in his paintings is based on some sort of outdoor sketch or study, and he has hundreds of outdoor paintings in his archives that he frequently pulls out to use as a reference.
Though the show at Maxwell Alexander Gallery has no specific theme, most of the paintings will feature the landscape of Moyers’ home state of New Mexico.
The show’s titular piece, Ribbons of Light,features a Native American man in a warbonnet foregrounded against a desert mountain background.
Ribbons of Light, oil, 24 x 24 in.
“I like doing those big portraits and having fun poses. It’s a kind of contemporary take on a Western classic,” Moyers says. The mountains and clouds in the background seem more colorful than life—but they aren’t. Moyers’ color work is entirely based on what he sees when he’s working outdoors. “It’s still so important for me to work outdoors,” he says. “As good as cameras are, they still don’t capture the true color of everything. The colors I use in my paintings are based on nature. Sometimes you can’t make these things up!”
Across the Taos Valleyis a more landscape-dominant painting, with riders in the shaded foreground, heading towards sun-soaked mountains. “I grew up in New Mexico, and I’ve seen this view so many times, and it’s always beautiful,” Moyers says. “Although every time I go back, it seems there are more structures around. I tend to leave those out when I’m painting.”
Across the Taos Valley, oil, 24 x 36 in.
Even when returning to the same spots year after year, Moyers says every painting session feels different. “That’s what’s so cool about nature. You could paint the same scene every day for a year, and it would be a different painting every day,” he says. “One time I thought I could start a bigger piece one day and come back the next day to finish it, but when I got there the next day, everything was so different.” When painting in plein air, he usually works on small canvases that he can finish in a single day, saving his larger works for when he’s back in the studio. “That way, I don’t have to try and remember what I saw the day before to finish the painting.”
Winter in the Air, oil, 24 x 24 in.
The painting Clouds Growing Fast captures just how quickly nature can change. It depicts New Mexico’s summer monsoon with a deep blue sky suddenly obscured by a wall of dark clouds. Rain is already falling on part of the landscape as a trio of riders attempts to outpace the storm. “It’s amazing how fast these clouds grow in the summer,” Moyers says. “If you take a photo with your phone, and then take another one in the exact same place 10 minutes later, you can tell they’ve doubled in size.”
The Charro, oil, 36 x 24 in.
Another Taos scene, Winter in the Air, depicts the region during the opposite season. A Native man is featured in the foreground, bundled in multiple layers as a cool sun shines on his face. “This painting was probably from late October or early November, when it first starts getting cold,” Moyers says. “The sky is totally different from Clouds Growing Fast. That’s summer, with stormy, heavy clouds, but this one captures the crispness of early winter.”
The Golden Season, oil, 24 x 24 in.
The show will also feature a few more figure-oriented pieces, as well as some more ambitious works that are still in progress. “I’ve got some more difficult subjects I’m working on now, and I’m not going to say what they are because that might jinx them,” Moyers says. “I wish everything worked out, but that’s not always the case.”
Ribbons of Light opens on April 4 at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Pasadena, California, and will remain on view through April 25. —
Maxwell Alexander Gallery 1300 N. Lake Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91104 » (213) 275-1060 » www.maxwellalexandergallery.com
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