Rebecca Moy

“Hummingbird” (detail).

Each month the Union League Club exhibits the work of a contemporary artist on its third-floor landing.  The shows are usually of paintings, as many or few as can fit on the two walls set aside to accommodate them.  Works are for sale and hang there for a month, creating favorable conditions for a low-key aesthetic encounter.  A month is a goodly amount of time to get to know a painting and let the impressions sink in.

This month, the featured artist has been Rebecca Moy.  I must say I have really enjoyed her paintings.  They are abstract but meticulously detailed, with wonderful clusters of colors and shapes, setting up an associative universe of objects and occasions.  Look long enough at a painting like ‘Hummingbird,’ and you may see faces, birds, beads, cigarettes, races, broken spectacles, pacifiers–even mummies.

There’s a cartoonish character to some of her canvases that brings to mind the work of Philip Guston, Ed Paschke, or even George Grosz.  The great thing about abstract art, though, is its invitation to sit back and make up your own stories, which is what these buzzy, ingenious canvases do.

You can see Moy’s portfolio by clicking here, or view a video of the artist painting and talking about her works (including ‘Hummingbird’) by clicking here.