There are many ways to unlock parts of ourselves. For Nancy Moore, the key was a box of crayons. In 1998 she treated herself to a deluxe 96-pack of Crayolas. She opened the lid, and the scent transported her to the cool green linoleum floor of her childhood playroom, where she spent hours drawing. The smell and feel of those crayons, coupled with her reverence for nature, led her to paint her first chameleon, entitled Self-Portrait, the idea being that women in particular change their colors often in order to fill many different roles. Moore composes the bits of prose that appear on some of her pieces, words that speak to the viewer about the fragility of both the natural environment and human relationships. Today her paintings and limited-edition giclée prints hang in homes from California to Vermont.

A resident of Ridgefield and former editor at Yale University Press, Moore has always been a “stealth artist,” having never studied art formally. In college, she took art courses as independent studies, wading her way cautiously from black-and-white pen and ink drawing into a sea of color under the guidance of Professor George Chaplin, a student of Josef Albers at Yale. Twenty-five years and two children later, she took the plunge into full-color exhibitionism at the Good News Café in Woodbury, CT, and hasn’t looked back. Juggling her editing and painting careers ever since, Moore has been looking for balance between the written word and the painted image. In 2006, she was invited to exhibit at Yale University’s Environmental Sciences Center, part of the Peabody Museum. The result was a one-woman show that ran for one year, featuring an ever-shifting menagerie of 19 reptiles, birds, insects, and other creatures in mixed media.

The materials used to create the paintings you see here are Crayola crayon, watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite. The crayons are applied within the barest pencil outline. When the watercolor is laid on top, a wax relief, or batik effect, is created. Layers of crayon, paint, and pencil are drawn and painted until a fabric of woven texture appears. The idea of transformation has been a key part of Moore’s work since the beginning: transformation of materials into images, of words into art, of animal into landscape, of human into animal, animal into human. Recently, Nancy has been shifting her focusing more intensely on the transformation of human into animal to the concept of transformation and evolution from animal to human, playing with the idea of shape-shifting and creation myth. She’s only just beginning...