Malcolm Campbell Moran

Some Thoughts About  The "Why" of My Work as an Artist

Malcolm Campbell Moran    

The power of certain rare images to awaken me to me, and me to that world of places and people out there and back then, happened when I was 12, very unexpectedly in a cave in southern France.  My mothers curiosity and my fathers adventurous independence, inspired a family vacation across Europe in 1960.  I was 12 years old and more excited about our rented VW bus than any of its destinations.

Our travel plans included a visit to the Paleolithic cave dwellings at Lascaux, France.  My mother had read about the discovery and subsequent opening of these cave paintings to the public, and her unique sense of being open to what was interesting moved her to include this rather atypical stopover on our itinerary.  I mention this because I owe such a debt of gratitude to my mother for this opportunity, created by her natural way of sensing the unusual and stepping outside a normal travel plan.  Two years later the caves were permanently closed to the public.  These ancient images have lingered deep within me, and informed me over the years in ways that words do not capture.

Even as a boy of twelve, I comprehended at my core that something was remarkable about this place and these images.  Stories, music, numbers ignite the curiosity of some children---mine was set afire by the 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 needed to speak.  17,000 years later, I was eavesdropping on a private conversation and feeling right at home.  A spirit was moving in these caves.

At twenty-two years old, I happened upon the same spirit in Mexico.  My small apartment abutted the studio of the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, in Cuernavaca Mexico.  In the sound of the sculptors chisel banging against the stone, was a voice beseeching me to begin to make images.  I made the transition from one merely sensing spirits to one trying to converse with them through images.  The wall between the artist and me in some strange way 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.