JILL MOSER

Over the last five years, Jill Moser’s work in printmaking has drawn inspiration from her collages. With In Play, the artist creates a new group of 28 monoprints, each exploring a subtle world of texture and color, having their own unique character.

Moser has always had a fascination with color. For this new project, she expanded her research from the Harvard University Museum’s “Atlas of Rare and Familiar Colour”, a treasure trove of color pigment samples gathered by the museum from around the world. Drawing inspiration from this collection and her painting series by the same name, she started on a new series of color woodcuts.

With the In Play series, Moser constructs playful groupings of color shapes in each print, showcasing the artist’s ability to build a unique color world.  Starting her project, the artist cut out curving shapes from smooth and textured plywood. The artist then inked the wood pieces in a range of colors. Next, like assembling pieces of a puzzle, the shapes were put back together again to form a square, and printed onto the handmade square paper. As the process is repeated, Moser selectively added more accents of woodcut color on top. The biomorphic shapes vary from print to print: from hot pink to blue-gray, or lemon and bright orange to violet. There is almost a kind of unique “weather”’ in each piece. As the project continued, Moser started to arrange the finished prints into groups, building sets of three or four with familial colors. Drawing us in with this sense of play, she keeps the dialogue open, and asks the viewer to join her in the visual conversation.

– Andrew Mockler