Statement

Some Thoughts

Malcolm Campbell Moran    

When I was twelve years old, my family made a pilgrimage to France to visit the cave drawings at Lascaux. Two years later they were closed to the public. Some inexplicable urge moved my mother to drag her young family to see these ancient images. Even as a twelve-year-old boy, I could comprehend at my core that something was remarkable about this place. The curiosity of some children is ignited by stories, music, numbers--- mine was set afire by 17,000-year-old cave drawings. Paleontologists believe that the cave drawings were meant as a kind of private conversation with the souls of the animals to whom these people were speaking. 17,000 years later, I was eavesdropping on a private conversation and feeling right at home. A spirit was moving in these these caves.

At twenty-two years old I happened upon the same sprit in Mexico. My small apartment abutted the studio of the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In the sound of the sculptor's chisel banging against stone was a voice beseeching me to begin making images. I made the transition from one merely sensing spirits to one trying to converse with them. The wall between the artist and me made the conversation more amplified and poignant than it would have been had there been no wall. Walls can do that.

Painting for me is a silent journey to places unknown. Images unfold as layer upon layer of preconceived thoughts are peeled away to reveal images with no conscious or rational origin. Paintings sometime evolve out of layers of paintings below them. Or sometimes subjects appear in dreams or daydreams and must be transposed onto canvas. I paint. I draw. The process and outcome are usually very different for both . At times I am compelled toward some subject and at times toward abstraction, but the conversation is the same.





My work attempts to speak to a certain reality that touches upon our deep and hidden nature ... images within images. The truth to which I refer is very far away from the objective, factual world of observed reality, but finds its source in it.

I have always been perfectly comfortable in the irrational world of myths, dreams, and paradox. My images are meant to embrace this ineffable world rather than rail against its opposite. The writer Thomas Moore expresses a viewpoint in Songs of Unforgetting that illustrates the core of my belief as an artist.

“There are many truths. If you happen among one, it may be comforting. But don’t dwell too long there, or you will miss the next truth, which will be equally important”.

It is my desire as an artist to open windows into the quiet, image heavy, timeless place of dreams and myths. These portals may point to simple truths upon which you may gaze. They may shake you or put you to sleep. I hope they will almost always transport you to places not usually visited ... on the other side of the wall.