Jeremy Moon

Jeremy Moon was a British abstract painter born in Altrincham, Cheshire in 1934. He read law at Cambridge University and worked in advertising before becoming an artist in 1961. He lived and worked in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey between 1966 and 1973. He died following a motorcycle accident near Kingston in November 1973.

From around 1959, Moon had been experimenting with ballet & modern dance, choreography, poetry and painting alongside his day-job in advertising. He visited the Situation exhibition in 1961, a survey of new large-scale abstract painting in Britain, and soon after decided he wanted to become an artist. He enrolled at Central School of Art but left shortly after three weeks, feeling that his own working practice and ideas were already established. In 1962, Moon won The Associated Electrical Industries Prize for Sculpture, a competition that was judged by his friend Phillip King, the British sculptor. At this time he was living and working in Chepstow Road, West London and had his first solo show at the nascent Rowan Gallery in Knightsbridge. Moon also married Elizabeth Bryant and started teaching part-time at St Martin's School of Art and Chelsea School of Art within the same year. In 1964 they moved to a 2-bedroom flat in Swiss Cottage and Moon used one room as a studio. Son Robert was born that year. In 1966 they bought a house in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey and during the following year Moon built a large studio in the back garden, taking a lead from John Hoyland who had moved to Kingston and built a studio shortly beforehand. (Painters Bernard Cohen and John Edwards also followed suit). Second son Benedick was born was born at home in 1966. The first works completed in the new Kingston studio in 1967 were the Y-shaped paintings. Daughter Georgina was born at home in 1970. Moon died following a motorcycle accident at Robin Hood roundabout on the A3 whilst commuting back from Chelsea to Kingston on 30 November 1973.

Jeremy Moon became a leading figure in British art during the 1960s and 1970s. His work was abstract and geometric in form. His early paintings until 1964 used oil on canvas, switching then to the new acrylic paints. He generally applied paint in a flat and unmodulated way using masking tape to delineate clear areas of colour. He was an early exponent of the shaped canvas and also produced a small number of 3D and relief works. Reoccurring motifs and elements within his paintings included grid-like forms composed of vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines. Drawing was a central part of his practice and he used pencil, pen and pastels incessantly on A4 letter-writing paper to develop ideas for works. His peers included John Hoyland, Bridget Riley, Ian Stephenson, Bernard Cohen, Patrick Caulfield, Phillip King and Anthony Caro.

[above text from Wikipedia]

Jeremy Moon is best known for his large-scale geometric paintings that explore form and space through unmodulated planes of color. He emerged onto the London scene in the early 1960s amidst the framework of Color Field and Hard-Edge Abstraction. Like many artists of this period, Moon sought a degree of wholeness within his compositions, creating works where painted geometries found affinities with the canvas’s overall shape. His use of the grid as a structural device was central to his working method; its rigid organization, yet flexible expandability, allowed him to bracket fields of color in a manner that was exploratory and effectual. Moon shrank, enlarged, skewed, and folded the grid across numerous works in his efforts to reveal ambiguity in pictorial space. His singular visual language is informed by his long-standing interest in dance and choreography; his work is saturated with rhythm-generating patterns and shapes with inherent directionalities, together forming a perceptible movement that subverts the static quality of painting.

[above text from Luring Augustine]