Moon's Blooms

June is a visual feast with gardens at their apex, rife with blooms and blossoms. The Cornwall Library is adding to the cornucopia with its new show, Thinking About Gardens featuring works by resident Ellen Moon.

The exhibit coincides with Books & Blooms on June 20 and 21, the library’s annual two-day garden-related event and benefit.

Moon is a lifelong artist who has found expression in three different arenas: costume making, textiles and watercolors. She is exhibiting her watercolors of private Cornwall gardens at the library as well as featuring two of her elaborately embroidered jackets with botanical themes.

Moon has been familiar with Cornwall all her life. Born in New York, she nevertheless spent summers in the rural town. “We came to Cornwall every summer, so Cornwall is my roots,” she said. “I have lived here in my grandparents’ house since the 1980s.”

Her grandparents were Hugh Ferriss, an architectural delineator whose work strongly influenced the development of the modern skyscraper city, and Dorothy (Lapham) Ferriss, an artist and illustrator for Vanity Fair magazine.

Even though her own parents were academics - “word people”— Moon was encouraged at home to follow her art. “When I was about four my grandmother said, ‘You should be an artist,’ But at school, when I was about nine, we talked in class about what we wanted to do, and I said I wanted to be an artist. The teacher said, ‘No you don’t, you can’t make a living.’”

A startling disparity in points of view perhaps but it failed to deter Moon, who pursued a Masters in Drawing followed by an MFA in Multimedia, both from the University of Iowa.

“In grad school, I started making costumes, masks and costumes like the ones I saw in Mexico when I studied there for a semester,” she explained. “At the time, I was making costumes and doing strange rituals in the woods that I was photographing but I soon realized that wasn’t going to work.”

Making costumes became a constant theme in her career however and for more than 40 years she has been associated with the Grumbling Gryphons Traveling Children’s Theater. The Grumbling Gryphons perform at schools, festivals and other public venues throughout the country, engaging thousands of children in participatory theater.

“Since 1982, I have been the designer and maker of masks, costumes and sets for the Gryphons and have also designed masks and costumes for Faustwork, Masque and Lotte Goslar. I have taught mask-making workshops for children at public and private schools, museums and festivals,” she said.

She enjoys her work with Leslie Elias, artistic director of the Gryphons. “It’s very spontaneous,” she said. “Leslie gives me assignments like illustrating the end of the world either by fire or ice or depicting the Sun God’s Palace. A lot of the shows are from folk tales, mythic legends, but she and her Gryphon crew wrote Ghost Net and I had a lot of fun with that. I had to make costumes for a squid, a horseshoe crab, a whale … “

Making the costumes presents unique challenges. The actors must be comfortable in them and able to move freely without damaging the costume. “For instance, in Ghose Net Leslie is a horseshoe crab and she falls on her back and then has to get up. So, there was a lot of engineering that went into making the costume strong but lightweight.”

That is accomplished by using foam rubber and fabrics drawn from “an awfully large stash of stuff that might come in handy.”

The Gryphons can be seen at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, MA, June 27th, presenting Anansi, the Trickster Spider, A West African Folktale. The troupe will then have its 45th Anniversary Celebration and Performance Gala, August 1st at 7 PM at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. During the production, Moon will dance as The Golden Lady in her grand puppet for the finale.

Her work with the theater is now parttime, primarily maintaining the costumes. “There is always wear and tear,” she said. “I didn’t know they were supposed to last this long.” Not part-time is her other work—creating intricately embroidered jackets and painting in watercolors.

Moon says, “For me, painting has become a form of meditation, an hour in the day when I have to concentrate on one thing and one thing only.” More than a quarter century ago, she began painting landscapes in watercolors and a few years back, she began to focus on the grand gardens of Cornwall.

She said she didn’t know how to do watercolors when she began and couldn’t “make sense” of the landscape. “You have to make the first 10,000 mistakes,” she said. “I have been a daily painter ever since. My efforts have also been a form of exercise—visual push-ups.

“I paint en plein air (in nature) all year round,”

“I like to tell stories and in my jackets I am reporting on some of the daily phenomena that I witness in the world around me—butterflies in the mist, the surprising beauty of a spider’s web, light and shadow in a field, the lively round of life and death in the pond.”

The library show displays two of her works in fiber: a jacket embroidered with spring flowering trees and shrubs and their pollinators and a kimono inspired by Yeats’s “The Song of the Wandering Aengus.”She said she uses all kinds of thread in her work. “I have a library of threads and a lot of them I dye myself.

When I am making a jacket, I knit the white background on a knitting machine. I then paint the design with dyes, like a watercolor. Sometimes I will paint a lot of leaves with the light coming down through them. I dye the threads I will work with and then embroider the heck out of it.”

She estimates it takes about 250 hours to create each Jacket. “That is one reason I do small daily paintings,” she confessed. “I feel like I’ve got something done if I paint a picture while I might only complete a couple of inches on a jacket.”

Her jackets are sold through the Mobilia gallery in Cambridge MA.

“My work has three strands—fiber, watercolors and costumes,” she concluded. “The strands are interlaced by my love of the natural world.”

The Cornwall Library is located at 30 Pine Street. It is open Tuesday, 10 AM-5 PM, Wednesday, noon to 7 PM, Thursday, noon to 5 PM, Friday, noon to 6 PM, Saturday, 10 AM to 2 PM and Sunday, noon to 3 PM. It is closed Monday.