Greenfield artist Robert Moorhead has long been attracted to working with letter forms as visual elements. Retired now from teaching at Deerfield Academy, Moorhead employs in his paintings some of the tools and visual forms from architecture and calligraphy, two of the subjects he taught.
A show currently at Oresman Gallery at Smith College offers a glimpse into Moorhead work. “Calligraphic Visions: A Series of Paintings Based on Letter Forms and Text,” is on view through August 30.
In some of Moorhead’s paintings, forms that look at first like calligraphy stretch and buckle, the ascenders or descenders of the partial letters meandering off to become tendrils or vines. The spaces between letters take on their own life as well, resembling hillsides or rounded human forms. There’s a sprawling, organic quality to these paintings, as if the calligraphy has freed itself from any pen or any obligation to state meaning.
Moorhead says he begins these compositions by scanning sets of calligraphic alphabets, then combining letters and applying effects in computer design software that allows him to twist and stretch them. He makes a collage of some of his printed out alterations, then draws a grid across it that provides a guide for transferring the composition to his stretched linen canvases. Moorhead works with acrylic paints, often adding fine lines and texture using a “very, very small brush.” Several layers of gloss medium applied when the painting is done give it the density and sheen of an oil painting.
Other of Moorhead’s paintings feel more regimented. Rows of hand-stenciled letters create grids whose uniformity is broken by what Moorhead calls the “interference” of paint that he drags down the canvas, using a metal ruler. The layers of paint create a pentimento effect, as if we are seeing remnants of previous versions of the painting through the more recent layers. In these paintings, the letters are not purely visual elements as they are in the calligraphic paintings; they provide a textual meaning. We read these paintings as well as look at them.
One painting borrows a line from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Die welt is alles was der fall ist. (The world is everything that is the case.)” Another small painting repeats the word “Silence” three times on a ground of nuanced white.
In “Liban” (the French spelling of Lebanon), Moorhead stenciled a line from a poem written in French by his wife, Andrea Moorhead: “Tant de corps gisent sur le sol disloqué.”
Moorhead translates the line into English: “So many bodies are laid out upon the dislocated land.”
The painting was sparked by a long and ongoing correspondence with a friend who lives in Beirut, Moorhead said.
In a follow-up email Moorhead wrote of his friend, “Our exchanges over the years taught me a great deal about Lebanese culture. Knowing the reality of her daily life and the hardships she and her family faced during certain periods, made me reflect on the history of the country. The images in the media, ironically enough, did not fully express the ravages to both human and natural landscapes. I saw the destruction in almost Biblical terms….phantom cities and statues whose history was intricately layered, era upon era. The red and green in the painting come directly from the Lebanese flag.”
The word “flag” is apt for many of the stenciled paintings which rely heavily on stripes for their visual impact.
Chuckling a little, Moorhead says he’d begun the striped paintings as a departure from the calligraphic ones but soon enough the stripes began to look like lines of text and he found himself adding letters, using the Le Corbusier stencils he’d used in architecture.
“Were you trying to get away?” I asked.
Moorhead shakes his head and laughs. “Yes, I was!”
Moorhead’s long career in graphic design makes it hard for him to ever really be free of text. Nor would he want to be. He and Andrea Moorhead publish Osiris, an international, multi-lingual poetry journal they founded in 1972. The journal is designed by Robert Moorhead and features his artwork inside and on the cover, lending Osiris its signature, elegant look. Andrea Moorhead’s black and white photographs are also often featured inside, as well as her poems in English or French.
You can find Osiris online or locally at Amherst Books.
Find Oresman Gallery downstairs in the Brown Fine Arts Center at Smith College, the building that also houses the Smith College Museum of Art at 48 Elm Street, Northampton. Hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more info: www.smith.edu/artmuseum; 413-585-2760.