|
Born and raised in the Texas Panhandle, Marvin Moon received his BA in Art at West Texas State U. in Canyon and worked in Amarillo for over a decade as a technical illustrator, freelance commercial artist and local gallery artist. Returning to school, he received an MA from New Mexico Highlands U. in Las Vegas and a Ph.D. from Penn State U. Subsequently, he took a position as a professor of art at Texas Tech U. in Lubbock where, as a part of his academic assignment, he taught research, painting and design and was the Graduate Coordinator for the Ph.D. in Fine Arts and the Master of Art Education degree programs. He retired in 1996. At Penn State, Moon's doctoral dissertation and research addressed an hypothesized relationship between creativity and extrasensory perception. The President of the Parapsychological Association (member body of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) served as one of his doctoral committee advisors. Moon feels that creativity and E.S.P. are essentially the same function, or that they spring from a common source, and he views the artmaking process as having much the same mythic and psychical dimensions. The act of creation by the artist, in his view, is concerned with the infusion of the artwork with connotative meaning, the creation of the votive art object. Technique is merely a means, a tool--albeit an important one. Dr. Moon is a realist, but his concern in his painting is to treat the veil of "us by our senses as the illusion it truly is. Every sensitive individual is aware of those moments, usually when one is alone, when the veil almost becomes a scrim. In some visceral way, one can almost "see" behind it. The impulse to somehow lift it is overpowering, and at those instances it actually seems possible to do so. The moment is electric. The familiar face of the veil seems the unreal and unnatural dimension as "true reality" dances behind it, tantalizing and eluding us. But it is there--. Moon paints the veil but attempts to infuse it with such intense and connotative reality" presented to feeling, meaning, and emotion that the world reifies such a moment in our common experience. Moon has exhibited in over a hundred
national competitive shows, including Watercolor USA, Midwest
Watercolor, Texas Watercolor, Kentucky Watercolor, Water Media
US Open, and Watercolor Art Society-Houston, and won a number
of awards, including six first places. He was Editor of TRENDS,
the official, juried journal of the Texas Art Education Association,
for nine years and was selected the Outstanding Art Educator
in the State of Texas in 1979. |
As
an artist, Marvin Moon paints primarily in watercolors and acrylics,
although he often uses oils. His subject matter teems with images
from his most intimate experiences and range from New Mexico
adobes and landscapes to West Texas plains and grain elevators
to Pennsylvania mountains and woods.