The iridescent shape of the Moon is a muse for painters, writers, and illustrators but it also inspires the creation of objects. Sculptures, ceramics, lamps. objects shaped like a moon are numerous. Just think about the Moon Mirror series by the highly regarded sculptor Anish Kapoor. The British-Indian artist works with reflective surface, on the evocative possibilities of solids and voids and his lunar mirrors reflect the ever-changing nature of the moon. But it is not just contemporary fashion. The Asian department of the incredibly valuable Detroit Institute of Arts preserves a precious porcelain from the 18th-century Korean tradition called Moon Jar. The concept is easy: joining together two separated bowls with a milky color. And the mind immediately flies to an asymmetrical but delicate full Moon.
Edward Twohig | Super Moon
Imagine yourself outside, on a crisp spring or autumn night, the breeze rustling the drooping boughs of the trees above you, the country pond nearby glistening silver with the light of the moon. And the moon – it dominates the sky with its otherworldly luminescence, which touches each tip of every leaf, each textured dip and dive of the trees’ bark, and each shimmering blade of grass. This scene, which both comforts and unsettles the viewer, like something out of a Victorian fairy tale, is what Edward Twohig portrays in his Super Moon series. These ethereal tableaux of moon, sky, and foliage were Edward’s artistic focus for the better part of 2020, when supermoons materialised three times in the spring and three times in the autumn – with April’s and October’s moons being the most spectacular.
A supermoon (technical name perigee-syzygy) is a full moon that appears when the celestial body is at its closest point to the earth, still over 220,000 miles from our planet. To the human eye, a supermoon appears approximately 14% bigger in diameter and 30% brighter than a full moon further away from the earth. It is an extraordinary, somewhat supernatural condition of gravity and atmosphere and it is the perfect subject for Edward Twohig’s drypoint prints. Edward uses both oil- and water-based printing ink to achieve a variety of textured lines to best evoke the exquisitely intangible feeling of a spring or autumn night flooded with atmospheric light. During the occurrences of these supermoons, Edward found that the moon’s “luminosity was silhouetted against the trees and spindly branches … as if they were electrically charged”. It was this magnetic vibrancy, which Edward describes as having “tingled the spine and optic nerves” during his nightly vigils, that made the artist feel that he had to commit these scenes to paper.
In this Super Moon suite of prints, and across Edward’s oeuvre in general, an expressive abstracted style meets the techniques of the Old Masters. Edward is an artist attuned not only to what he is making in the present, but how it speaks to the past – as shown by his 2018 labour of love, the touring exhibition and the publication Print REbels: Haden – Palmer – Whistler and the Origins of the RE (Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers). He is always conscious of how his practice “stands on the shoulders of giants”. First and foremost, there is Rembrandt van Rijn, the most eminent titan of printmaking. Edward calls him the “king-emperor of etching with drypoint” who commanded a “Beethovenesque presence and pathos” in his work. There are similarities between the ways in which Rembrandt and Edward deploy the drypoint technique, and both artists make full use of the velvety burr so characteristic of the etched drypoint line. In Rembrandt’s etchings, this texture nimbly suggests in printed form the dramatic light for which his paintings were renowned. In Edward’s Super Moon pieces, the drypoint mark lends the moonscapes the “electrically charged” feeling that Edward describes them as having – as if the leaves are standing to attention, the energy of the moon’s light coursing through them.
The large-looming nineteenth-century critic and polymath John Ruskin is a historical figure who sits just below Rembrandt in Edward’s artistic pantheon. Ruskin’s drawings and writings – particularly those espousing the importance and beauty of truth to nature’s “distilled essence” – influenced Francis Seymour Haden, Samuel Palmer, Frank Short, and Malcolm Osborne, all artists who have then fuelled and inspired Edward’s fervour for printmaking tradition and technique. Not only does Edward admire their work, but he is an avid collector himself.
He does not simply possess prints by these masters, but he asserts that they “possess” him, providing what he calls “visual nourishment”. He began collecting prints when he was only 17, and his collection has grown to incorporate many more artists, including printmakers represented by Eames Fine Art. His accumulated artistic nourishment has become a feast, and Edward is never short of inspiration around him.
But throughout 2020, the moon – diffusing its reflected light onto scenes surrounding Marlborough and Little Bedwyn in Wiltshire – was Edward’s primary visual stimulus. His symphonic Super Moon suite of prints is evocative of place, space and hushed silence in moonlight. These works also awaken us to the timeless beauty and intricacy of drypoint printmaking and remind us of the fleeting conditions that allow for the breath-taking elegance and beauty of our natural surroundings. Edward’s Super Moon suite will hopefully prompt art lovers to look up at the sky more often, and with added appreciation. As Galileo wrote in The Starry Messenger (1610), “It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the moon”. To end this introduction to Edward Twohig’s newest exhibition, it’s best to conclude with the artist’s own thoughts on the atmospheric, societal, theoretical, and theological importance of creating a suite of drypoint monoprints depicting the moon and its effects:
“It has been fifty-two years since we landed on the Moon. Beyond its physical power over our oceans’ tides, and its influence on life on Earth, the Moon carries a wealth of connotations. What do we project onto this celestial body? The Moon can be portrayed as a witness to earthly events, as a companion, as a world or as a territory to be colonised and conquered. Moonlight reveals the environment at night, familiar shapes taking on a new character. The Moon is captivating, and a comfort spiritually, emotionally, visually, and intellectually. The whispering of moonlight, especially when it is more sharply defined and illuminated, appears to be animated; surrounded by the tangible and intangible of shadows and half shadows. It reminds me of the lightness of a Japanese screen-painting added to something approaching the many-textured richness of Rembrandt’s etchings. In essence, it is this glimmering whisper of the poetic soul that I aim to capture within each composition in my Super Moon 2020 suite of drypoint monoprints”.
Christine Slobogin, January 2021
5) The First Moonlight Painting of History
Have you ever wondered what was the first painting in which the night sky is really the night sky? What is the first art image where the Moon and its constellations are realistically depicted? The 2022 Milan Triennale, dedicated to the Unknown and surprisingly curated by an astrophysicist, gave us an answer: it is The Flight into Egypt, an oil-on-copper painting by the German painter Adam Elsheimer, dating from 1609.
In this portrait of the holy family, the vault of heaven is astonishing for scientific reasons. The sky is not dotted with randomly placed stars, but the painter depicts the Milky Way, after direct astronomical observations or perhaps because of his knowledge of Galileo Galilei’s coeval treatises about the Moon. In fact, the Moon is the real protagonist with her irregular and cratered surface, and its suggestive light illuminates the pond, reflecting in it as in a mirror. Then, we are faced with the first piece of Moonlight art. with astronomical value!
4) A Lunar, Lunar Night
Starry Night is perhaps one of the most famous paintings in the prolific oeuvre of the Master of Modern Art Vincent Van Gogh. In this nocturnal landscape, inspired by the view from his window at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, the painter depicts the picturesque Provençal village after the sunset, perched on the hills, the dark cypress tree in the foreground, and the sky lit by shining stars and swirling clouds.
But let’s try to focus for a moment on another main element: the glowing yellow crescent Moon in the upper right of the canvas. The Moon is depicted as a radiating orb, and it relates to the close Planet Venus. The moonlight is represented through gestural painting and color, where each natural element loses its real sense to acquire that emotion. Objective reality is transfigured by the artist’s tormented subjectivity, in the grip of delirious episodes. And so also the Moon and the night become symbols of hallucinated dreams and dark premonitions of death.
3) Magritte and the Hidden Face of the Moon
Surrealist painters, and in particular the Belgian René Magritte, are among the artists who attributed the most significance to the Moon in their art. Interested in painting the dreamlike and irrational world, surrealists chose the Moon as an enigmatic metaphor for the surreality that rests hidden in our reality. After all, who more than an element of whom we know only one face can become a symbol of the hidden unconscious?
Magritte sows his paintings with moons and meaning. In one of the most striking works, three crescent moons levitate over three men’s heads, dressed in black. They are the same person, showing us different faces of themselves, or not showing it at all by turning their back. Like the moons above their heads, which hide a face we will never see, humans also carry a secret and inner world that they do not easily show to others, where dreams, feelings, and fears find space. An intuitive world that does not emerge in the daylight, but when the light of reason goes out.
I want to fly… that’s what I’m in it for – Laurie Anderson
To the imagination of the ensuing generation of Romantic writers and artists, the Moon is less a utilitarian prop than a lyrical aspiration, emblematic of unreachable ideals. William Blake’s charming engraving I Want! I Want! (1793), which envisions a childlike figure erecting a long slender ladder to the Moon, is indicative of the age’s fragile longing for meaningful social reforms. As an object of wistful yearning, the Moon imprints itself indelibly on several influential masterpieces of the 19th Century as well.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1818) offers a meditative approach (Credit: Alamy)
Caspar David Friedrich’s affecting double portrait of pensive companions, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1818), is the very picture of mindful meditation. Framed ruggedly by a ragged gnarl of branches, the Moon offers itself to the conjoined mind of these wanderers as a counterpoint to the fleeting concerns of our ephemeral existence. To the troubled consciousness of Vincent van Gogh, near the end of the century, the anguished orb that clenches its gold and white knuckles in the corner of Starry Night (1889) is a tightening knot of inner fire that is as disquieting as it is blazingly beautiful.
In Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), the moon is disquieting as well as beautiful (Credit: Alamy)
The many phases of the Moon’s meaning, evolving as it has over the course of its long journey across humans’ cultural imagination from prehistory to the present, will necessarily shape every observer’s experience of Anderson and Hsin-Chien’s immersive work. Less a blank slate than a rich palimpsest of accumulating connotations, the Moon can only be appreciated anew if we strip away what we think we know about it and about ourselves. Like all great works of art, To the Moon aims to facilitate the finding of oneself through a paradoxical process of self-loss. “I think you can lose yourself in a Russian novel, and you can lose yourself in a pencil drawing,” Anderson says, “but you lose yourself in VR in a more organic way”. At the core of this extraordinary work is a desire to orchestrate “a sense of disembodiment”, allowing visitors to dissolve into the endlessly swelling mystery of the Moon. “I want to fly,” she tells me, “that’s what I’m in it for.”
To the Moon by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang will be presented by HTC VIVE Arts, official Virtual Reality Partner of Art Basel in Hong Kong, from 29 to 31 March 2019.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
