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Tribute to P. Buckley Moss from Canada Goose Gallery
With heavy hearts, we at Canada Goose Gallery join the world in mourning the loss of an extraordinary artist, P. Buckley Moss. Patricia Buckley Moss was more than just an artist; she was a visionary who captured the spirit of American life and culture with a delicate and masterful touch. Her passing marks the end of an era, but her legacy will continue to inspire and enchant generations to come.
What is all the hoopla surrounding the Kentucky Derby? Unlike any other sporting events, the Kentucky Derby is one-of-a-kind! With a crowd of more than 150,000 people, unparalleled history and tradition and its unique spectacle, the Kentucky Derby has been described by Forbes Magazine as one of the “Greatest Bucket-list Sporting Events” in America. Every year, on the first Saturday in May, thousands of guests gather under the Twin Spires at Churchill Downs to create lifelong memories with their friends and family.
We would like to make Kentucky Derby Time even more spectacular with the artistic inspirations of P. Buckley Moss art. We’ve put together some room inspirations that are certain to make everyone rave! Put a table setting or a room makeover together for you Kentucky Derby open house that’s sure be please your guests.
Patricia Buckley Moss stands outside the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech has named its $100 million arts center building in tribute to artist and philanthropist Patricia Buckley Moss, whose recent donation in support of the center is one of the largest gifts the university ever has received.
“The Moss Arts Center is a spectacular testament to how important the arts are to any university that values comprehensive excellence,” Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger said Oct. 23, nine days before the center was to host its first performance.
Speaking in the center’s third-floor lobby, Steger said the university Board of Visitors’ recent decision to name the center in Moss’ honor was particularly fitting, due not only to her generosity toward the project, but to her prominence in the arts and her longtime advocacy for incorporating the arts into education.
Moss, who signs her paintings P. Buckley Moss, has works represented in more than 200 galleries, has won numerous awards, and is the namesake of a foundation that works with teachers to promote using the arts in teaching.
In her advocacy work, Moss, who is dyslexic, has cited her personal Stroy of struggling in school until an open-minded teacher recognized her artistic potential. Moss wound up enrolling in a high school for the fine arts and, later, in New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
“The arts can change people’s hearts, change their minds, and change their lives,” Moss said. “I was lucky enough to find them at a young age, and they opened up so many learning avenues and professional opportunities for me. That is why I am so excited about the impact this wonderful facility will make on thousands of people, young and old, across this entire region of our state.”
Moss committed $10 million toward construction of the arts center at Virginia Tech. That gift and others have been critical to funding the project, Elizabeth “Betsy” Flanagan, the university’s vice president for development and university relations, explained.
“The power of philanthropy has literally reshaped the university’s landscape, evident in this building and all across the campus,” Flanagan said, adding that the private fundraising goal of $28 million for the arts center project had been exceeded.
Designed by the award-winning architectural firm Snøhetta, the 147,000-square-foot center is located near the corner of the Alumni Mall and North Main Street.
On Nov. 1, Philip Glass and his ensemble will give the first performance in the Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre, located within the Moss Arts Center building’s Street and Davis Performance Hall. Along with that performance space, the center contains visual arts galleries, an experimental venue known as the Cube, and extensive studio space for educational and research activities.
“The scope and scale of the work we now can bring to campus is unprecedented in this region,” said Ruth Waalkes, the university’s associate provost for the arts, who is also executive director of the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, which is responsible for programming and operations within the new facilities.
Waalkes also said the center will bring “new opportunities for learning, discovery, and engagement for our students” and will make “world-class arts experiences accessible and affordable for people across the region.”
Increasing the prominence of the arts at Virginia Tech was a goal Steger – who has announced he will step down once a new university president can be hired – outlined in his 2000 inaugural address.
At the naming announcement, he described the Moss Arts Center as symbolic of a much broader effort that has included the addition of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology; construction of Theatre 101; the addition of several graduate degree programs in the arts, renovation or construction of learning spaces for arts programs; and the hiring of additional faculty.
“This magnificent building shows the value we place on the arts at Virginia Tech, and is part of a series of major investments we have made in the arts,” Steger said.
Launched in 2005 as an arts initiative, Virginia Tech Arts encompasses all efforts within departments and colleges and at the university level to expand creative practice and support interdisciplinary learning, engagement, and discovery through the arts. The cornerstone project of Virginia Tech Arts is the Moss Arts Center, which houses the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech professional presenting program; the university-level Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology; and television and lab spaces for the Department of Communication.
Reprint from http://bit.ly/MossCenterFacility www.CanadaGooseGallery.com
“I was lucky enough to find [the arts] at a young age, and they opened up so many learning avenues and professional opportunities for me. That is why I am so excited about the impact this wonderful facility will make on thousands of people, young and old, across this entire region of our state.”
Moss Arts Center: An extraordinary canvas for art and education
That first painting, done while Moss was grammar- school age, was followed
by many others. And while Moss may not have cared what others thought of her artwork, her talent was recognized by a teacher whose encouragement helped convince Moss’ mother to send her daughter to Washington Irving High School, in Manhattan, which had a strong arts program.
Though Moss continued to get poor grades at that school, her art portfolio drew attention from the school principal, Mary Meade, who recommended it be entered for scholarship competitions. Moss wound up attending New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a key step in her artistic career.
In October, Virginia Tech announced it had named its $100 million arts center for Moss in tribute to her commitment of $10 million toward construction. The university also announced it had exceeded its $28 million private fundraising goal for the project.
“The arts can change people’s hearts, change their minds, and change their lives,” Moss said shortly before the announcement. “I was lucky enough to find them at a young age, and they opened up so many learning avenues and professional opportunities for me. That is why I am so excited about the impact this wonderful facility will make on thousands of people, young and old, across this entire region of our state.”
Within the Moss Arts Center is the Street and Davis Performance Hall, which contains the 1,260-seat Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre. The arts center facility also includes what was once Shultz Hall. Along with the theatre, the facility features visual arts galleries; studios; Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology; and the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, which programs and operates the Moss Arts Center.
The Moss Arts Center is the cornerstone project of a broad e ort at Virginia Tech to expand creative practice and to support interdisciplinary learning, engagement, and discovery through the arts.
Moss said the scope of the project and her family ties to Virginia Tech led her to want to get involved. Her generous support of the arts at Virginia Tech is also
in keeping with her history of philanthropy aimed at promoting the arts in education. A foundation that bears her name has been active in that area for many years, and Moss regularly travels to speak with students and teachers.
“All of us have to try to make a di erence, to educate kids, and to help them have some self-esteem,” Moss said. “I learned my self-worth through the arts.”
Hours before the first performance in Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center took place, hundreds gathered to celebrate the completion of the spectacular new facility.
Speaking to a crowd containing many donors and administrators who played important roles in the project’s success, Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger said the investment in the arts made by the university and its supporters “is really a major factor propelling Virginia Tech to greater national stature.”
He added that “a vigorous and visible presence for the arts, we believe, will mark our campus as an even more comprehensive and well-rounded university, while enabling us to compete for funding at the highest levels and enhance our ability to attract the best students and faculty.”
Several key donors to the project said seeing the facility come to fruition was a historic day for the university, and they explained why they considered the center to be such a compelling initiative to support.
Standing in the 1,260-seat Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre, named in honor of his wife and mother, Gene Fife (business administration ’62) said the arts center “just adds more depth and richness to the experience of being here in Blacksburg.”
Sherwood “Sherry” Payne Quillen (health and physical education ’71) said looking at the first art exhibit in the gallery within the center that bears her name was “exhilarating—almost surreal,” and that the scale of the overall center was “larger than life.”
Nicholas Street (general business ’53), who along with his wife, Fay ( nance ’77), helped name the Street and Davis Performance Hall, predicted the facility would “take Virginia Tech to a new level; it’s another piece to the puzzle.”
William C. “Jack” Davis, who along with his wife, Sandra, are also namesakes of the performance hall, said watching the progress of construction had seemed slow at times, since he lives in Blacksburg and would frequently pass the construction site on his way to work on campus, but “it’s absolutely thrilling to see it come together now, and to also see all the people who were involved [gather] in one room.”
Nancie Roop Kennedy named an elevator in the center for her late husband, Duncan C. Kennedy III (electrical engineering ’61), and made a point of riding it shortly after the ribbon was cut in celebration of the building’s opening.
“I named an elevator guring if I could ride it high enough, I could meet my husband up in the clouds,” she said. “I’m sure he’s up there, looking down on all this, smiling.”
by Albert Raboteau
Source:
2008 Virginia Women in History
EXCERPTS FROM
“Symbolism and Iconography in the Art of P. Buckley Moss”
Symbols: A representation that stands for or has a meaning different from what is visually apparent. For example, a lamb may be used as a symbol of Christ in an image.
Symbolism in art is the practice of using an image to represent that which is tangible or intangible or to invest a thing or object with a meaning that is not readily apparent. The use of the image suggests a deeper or subconscious meaning other than what is visually portrayed. Symbolism is the hidden meaning behind the visual image.
Iconography: Not to be confused with “Icon.” Iconography is the area of study dealing with the description of visual images and symbols. This is the ‘subject’ of a work of art.
Icon: A revered work, specifically a portrait representing a saintly person such as Christ, the Virgin Mary, Madonna and Child or any number of Saints. An icon can appear in any medium, though most often the word is associated with painting. In art history, icons appeared specifically in Byzantine, Greek, Russian Orthodox church art representing Christ or the Madonna. In Buddhist art, the image itself becomes more than the image of the saint portrayed, but rather becomes the embodiment of that figure (usually Buddha). Some paintings, such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was so beloved by its viewers it became an icon. In Moss art, The Blue Madonna could be considered an icon as it is a beloved work of a revered personage.
The Canada Geese
Throughout the history of western art and civilization the geese served as religious icons to which virtuous qualities were attached. In early Christian art they represented the theological idea of Divine Providence. They were harbingers of weather and changes of season, and therefore seen as blessing from God. It was noted by some that geese mate for life and both the male and female participate in the raising of baby birds. This observation evolved with geese becoming symbols for loyalty and matrimony.
There was of course one flaw and that was the scaly, clawed webbed foot of the goose which traditionally is a symbol for pride, a sin. The devil in depictions during Medieval and Renaissance times was often shown with the webbed foot of the goose as appendages. Pat’s Canada Geese are symbols of Divine Providence. They are often painted in pairs to represent loyalty, matrimony and vigilance. They are painted without their feet so as not to have any negative connotations associated with her symbols of divinity.
The Plain People
When Pat arrived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1964 she became acquainted with the Amish and Old Order Mennonites who lived in the counties surrounding Waynesboro. While the plain people have a long history going back to the Anabaptists, Pat’s highly stylized interpretation of them is both generic and symbolic. The figures do not represent specific individuals, but are used for their visual archetypal value.
With their strong work ethic, traditional lifestyle and devotion to faith, family and community these plain people became part of her iconography; symbolic “Living Saints,” supplanting earlier Catholic ones. The elongated figures, part of Pat’s unique style, are shown as hard working, faithful, and family oriented. The woman is often depicted holding a basket of eggs or a baby in a basket to represent new life. The man is often shown with a bucket of sticks, a symbol of manhood or fertility, which is a common symbol found throughout art history.
The figures are depicted holding a basket of apples to indicate both a strong work ethic and the ‘fruits’ of labor. The female figures are painted as slightly transparent with the landscape showing through part of her torso. This transparency is used to symbolize the ‘earth mother’ or woman’s intuitive nature.
The Moravian Style House
The Moravian Style House, also called the generic house or spirit house, is based on the German style houses from the Moravian period of 1741 to 1844. The Moravian community was founded in Pennsylvania to form a kind of utopia which attempted to bring Christianity to Native Americans while still allowing for cultural expression. Their communal way of life established extraordinary 18th-century industry and hand made crafts which came about through shared cooperative efforts. The Moravian style houses and other communal buildings, including churches, were combined with 18th-century German style architectural elements. These included the use of herringbone pattern doors, high pitched roofs with flared eaves, brick jack-arched windows and doors, tiled roofs, sloping-roofed dormers, and parged stone walls. The deep-set windows represent the largest collection of Germanic style architecture in the United States.
In Pat’s art, the Moravian style house is also referred to as a ‘spirit house’ or ‘generic’ house. The house is often painted without doors or a roof to symbolize a spiritual dwelling, after all a spirit doesn’t need a door or a roof in order to be closer to God. These stylized building are generally painted as a vertical element with long, clean lines. Buildings depicted with doors and a roof are usually realistic representations of an actual place.
Eggs & Apples
Eggs in Moss art signify new life or resurrection. Eggs in art history are often used as symbols of fertility.
Likewise, apples in a basket represent the ‘fruits’ of physical labor or if the figure holding the basket is female it could denote the woman’s ability as a child bearer or archetypal earth mother.
Source: https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vawomen/2008/pdf/MossSymbolismandIconographyDocument.pdf
Patricia Buckley Moss (1933- )
Waynesboro, artist and philanthropist
Patricia Buckley Moss uses the considerable commercial success she has earned as an artist to aid child-related charities and promote the use of the arts to help children with learning disabilities succeed in school and in life.
Even though Patricia Buckley Moss (born May 20, 1933) was born in New York City and now divides her time between homes in Florida and Virginia, much of her art is rooted in the Shenandoah Valley. The rural scenery, along with the serenity, work ethos, and traditional pursuits of the Amish and Mennonite communities, had a profound effect on Moss when she moved to Waynesboro with her family in 1964. The modest lifestyle of the Valley inhabitants soon began to appear in her paintings and drawings.
Moss has dyslexia, which made grade school a struggle for her. Later, in high school, her artistic abilities were recognized and nourished, and in 1951 she received a scholarship to New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. By late in the 1960s Moss began marketing her work. The P. Buckley Moss Museum opened in Waynesboro in 1989, and today galleries nationwide carry her works.
Moss has been generous with her earnings and focused on child-related charities. In 1985 she helped famine-struck African countries through a Mennonite African relief fund. Since then her generosity has expanded, especially in her efforts to help children with learning disabilities. Collectors of Moss’s works established the P. Buckley Moss Society in 1987 to promote her charitable ideals, and the P. Buckley Moss Foundation for Children’s Education, founded in 1995, supports the arts in educational programs, with a focus on children with special needs. In 1988 journalist Charles Kuralt described Moss as “The People’s Artist,” a compliment she considers the greatest that could be bestowed on her.
Source: http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vawomen/2008/honorees.asp?bio=6
Pat Moss comes to the door of the Barn– her house in Waynesboro– and wonders who the heck is standing on her doorstep. She’s forgotten that she has an interview scheduled this morning, but she quickly takes the interruption in stride and seats her visitors in her huge living room in a former apple packing barn.
You’d never build a barn like this today,” says Moss. “It wouldn’t pass code.”
The Barn is one of several Moss residences. She’s just in from her main home in Florida for an event at her eponymous museum, where she’s unveiling a new painting to raise money for Harrisonburg TV station WVPT.
Folks familiar with P. Buckley Moss only as the artist who paints distinctively elongated pictures of the so-called “plain people,” the Amish and Mennonites of the Shenandoah Valley, might wonder whether she’s as blankly upright as some of her images.
Moss quickly disabuses a visitor of that notion. She’s getting ready to go on a Disney cruise with her six children and 10 grandchildren. “Does that sound like fun?” she asks. “It sounds like a nightmare.”
Her career, by contrast, has been something of a dream. The wife of a chemical engineer, Pat Moss came to Waynesboro in 1964 at age 31 with five small children in tow and a sixth on the horizon. Today, her paintings hang in some of America’s top galleries, and her personal appearances have been known to draw standing-room-only crowds clamoring for prints that can sell for nearly $1,000 each.
By 1985, Moss was well known enough that the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts held a retrospective of her work. A group of art teachers from Virginia Tech were there, and when Moss returned to the gallery, “They were ripping my work, saying, ‘She just knocks these things out,'” remembers Moss.
“I don’t have time to care,” Moss says. “I can’t afford to care.” She has fans to attend to.
Crowd control
Now nearly 74, when Moss returns to Waynesboro it’s usually a working trip to take care of business at the P. Buckley Moss Museum– home of her original paintings– which opened in 1989 off Interstate 64. Even her home in the Barn turns into a workplace of sorts. It has a velvet rope through the living room for crowd control when Moss collectors and fans line up to get her autograph. And there are other measures designed to keep the line of fans moving.
“They aren’t allowed to talk to me,” says Moss, “but I talk to them. And I get two bathroom breaks.”
It’s also usually for business that she goes to her house in Chesapeake, where the Moss Portfolio publishing and distribution center is. “I come in for an hour, and I’m there four hours,” she says.
Hence the appeal of Florida. She can paint, the light is great, and there’s no Buckley-mania.
“My friends in Florida are all filthy rich,” she says. “They don’t care how much money I have or what I do. I don’t want people knocking on my door everyday. If they do, I tell them I’m the maid. And I look like the maid, not someone who owns this multimillion-dollar property.”
She also owns two houses in Italy, where she likes to do etchings. “At one time I had 15 properties– can you believe it?”
Harder to believe is this– a dyslexic girl from Staten Island grew up to launch one of the most successful art careers today– from Waynesboro– and it’s not all about the Amish and footless geese.
Portrait of the artist as a young girl
“I liked to be Tarzan,” recalls the former Patricia Buckley. One day when she was swinging alone on a rope swing, the line broke. “I landed in the dirt, and I was knocked out for a long time.” Another time she broke her arm sliding down a New York fire escape.
Tomboyish athleticism came more easily to her than success in the classroom, but she didn’t find out she was dyslexic until she was an adult. Fortunately for the young Pat, a nun realized there was an artistic young woman in their midst, and her mother got her into the Washington Irving High School for the Fine Arts in Manhattan. From there she went to art school at the Cooper Union on a full scholarship.
“I was very lucky,” she says.
Early on, before ever seeing the Shenandoah Valley that she became famous for portraying, she was painting horses. And religious images.
“My daughter does so many of these goddamn crucifixions. I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” Moss quotes her mother as saying. Elizabeth Buckley, a Sicilian American, had been a dress designer and worked as a tour guide at her daughter’s museum before she died nearly six years ago at age 97.
Moss chuckles at the memory of her mother who “just wanted to get a rise” out of museum visitors.
P. Buckley Moss settled on her professional moniker early on. “Women were not respected when I was in school,” she says. “Men got all the scholarships, the Fulbrights. So I said I’d be a man.”
After the Cooper Union, she married Jack Moss and had six kids in nine years. So how did she paint?
“I stayed home,” she replies. “I worked a lot at night, and still do.” And in 1981, after she renovated the Barn (it’s now surrounded by a Waynesboro subdivision), she built a cottage next door for her children so she could continue burning the midnight oil without putting up walls.
A 1966 painting, “Madonna,” is a self-portrait of a serious, dark-haired young woman holding a blond infant– Christopher, her youngest, who was born that year. She looks tired.
Valley girl
Unlike most New Yorkers who migrate to Virginia, Moss doesn’t confess any culture shock, perhaps because when you have six kids, you’re in a different kind of shock. But one image took root.
She was familiar with the Amish in Pennsylvania, and in 1967, after her introduction to the local Mennonite and Amish communities in Waynesboro, she began her “plain people” series.
Over the years, the plain people, who eschew modern machines and value modesty, have become part of the Moss iconography.
“They thank me for depicting them in a way that is wholesome,” she says.
In 1978, Moss met Malcolm Henderson, who became her business manager and second husband.
“Malcolm was a marketing genius,” says Peter Rippe, director of the P. Buckley Moss Museum from 1989 to 2000. “Malcolm Henderson had a lot to do with moving her from a sidewalk artist to a gallery artist.”
Rippe recounts a story about their first meeting, when Henderson had a gallery in Georgetown and displayed in the window a Moss painting he’d gotten from a client.
Someone told Moss about it, and she was mystified because she knew she hadn’t given it to the gallery to sell. She came in and demanded, “Where did that come from?”
“One of my customers was trading up,” Henderson answered, according to Rippe, who laughs.
Henderson insisted that Moss screen her dealers and use the best reproductive techniques, printers, and paper, Rippe says. “He was a stickler for fine framing.”
Perhaps more importantly, Moss’s art is accessible, and that serves a function, says Second Street Gallery director Leah Stoddard. “She offers people the opportunity to put something on the wall other than a Monet poster.”
But Stoddard says she would not try to mount a Moss show at Second Street, which features emerging artists on the way to regional or national recognition.
“Her work is not considered by critics as groundbreaking,” says Stoddard. “It has not tended to push the envelope. It’s more decorative in nature and about design. The pioneering spirit isn’t there for me as a curator.”
Stoddard doesn’t mind an artist with a marketing machine, but she cautions, “People may buy a P. Buckley Moss print for $1,000 and think it’s really worth that.”
She compares mechanically mass-produced prints– “Some of her runs are in the hundreds, and that could be problematic”– to the dying art of hand-pulled prints done by a master printer and the artist in runs of, say, 30.
On the website prints.com, the hundred or so Mosses run from an 8.5-inch print of “Early Christmas Morning” for $49.99 to the nearly 21-inch wide “The Doctor’s Office” for $809.95.
“Collectors get confused about what is valuable when they can have hand-pulled prints for less,” says Stoddard. “In this town, you can buy an original work for under $200.”
That logic is unlikely to dissuade P. Buckley Moss fans, who may eye fancy-pants Charlottesville art galleries with suspicion. And Moss herself isn’t keen on going to Charlottesville. “It’s too crowded,” she says.
People’s artist
When she was in school, Moss admired “all the people you’d suppose who work hard.” By that she means El Greco, Modigliani, and Picasso– although she offers a stipulation with Picasso.
“I wouldn’t hang his work,” she says. “He wasn’t a nice person. He was a bastard, but I admire what he accomplished.”
She also confesses a fondness for Michelangelo: “I love David’s rear end in Florence. He has the best buns.”
Moss may not do sculpture, but her subject matter and style go far beyond the plain people and pastels that many associate with her work.
“Pat is a formally trained artist,” says Malcolm Henderson’s son, Jake, president of P. Buckley Moss Galleries Ltd. “You can see where her work has a very solid art background.”
“It’s not folk art,” says Moss. “It is a realistic form of stylized impressions. It starts with an abstract concept, and I make it more understandable.”
She mentions her blue flowers, which are more Matisse than Grandma Moses, and she’s done cubist crucifixions.
So what’s with the footless geese?
“In the Bible, feet are a sign of pride,” says Moss before she refers the question to Bonnie Stump, curator of the P. Buckley Moss Museum, who’s written a guide to the symbolism and iconography in Moss’s art.
“She paints them without feet because in the Renaissance, the devil [was depicted with] webbed feet,” explains Stump. “She didn’t want that on her divine creatures.” Geese, for Moss, are symbols of divine providence, loyalty, and matrimony.
Stump makes a more practical observation– a lot of times the birds are standing in snow, in water, in grassy fields, or in the sand on beaches, so you wouldn’t see their feet anyway.
Why is Moss so popular?
Jake Henderson points to her ability to paint a broad number of subjects in a broad number of styles– landscapes, architecture, animals. Abstract, expressionistic, realistic.. to a degree.
“Her style makes her work collectible,” says Henderson. “And it’s not available on every street corner.”
He adds that the variety also appeals to a large number of people. “And because she’s always trying something new, it keeps her work fresh.”
Her employees also note that Moss is a workhorse. “She paints all the time,” says Henderson. “She crisscrosses the country and brings new people into the galleries– the next generation of collectors.”
Backing her in that marketing effort is the P. Buckley Moss Galleries. “We’re in this business to promote Pat’s career, maintain her stature as a top artist, and maintain the value of her work for her collectors,” says Henderson.
Moss’s successful promotion of her art calls to mind another art marketing machine. But Rippe, who wrote a book about Moss called Painting the Joy of the Soul, doesn’t think “painter of light” Thomas Kinkade’s marketing– or art– is really comparable.
Kinkade runs ads in popular magazines and newspapers and has Franklin Mint editions of his work. “Pat has had her art handled by dealers,” says Rippe. “Certainly she has not advertised the way Thomas Kinkade has.”
Nor has she accumulated lawsuits from disgruntled dealers. Kinkade has been sued by gallery owners, including one in Charlottesville, for deep discounting of his prints on QVC and at a chain store called Tuesday Morning.
Rippe sees major differences between the popular artists. Even though both do lighthouses and vernacular buildings, Rippe compares Kinkade’s style to the romanticism of the 19th-century’s Hudson River School. “He’s so romantic in his approach that he becomes sticky… If you take romanticism to an extreme, you have Thomas Kinkade.”
While acknowledging that Moss can be sentimental, Rippe says, “She’s closer to a medieval illumination. She works basically from a religious platform. She uses line and color as a medieval illuminator. She illuminates with meaning, not light. Not that Pat would ever say that.”
What Kinkade and Moss do share: “People are looking for something they can understand in their art,” says Rippe. “She paints for the people.”
The Amish, her fading horizon lines and soft colors have an appeal. “People seem to enjoy her art, and they enjoy it on a simple level,” says Rippe. “It’s a very decorative style and can be recognized by anyone.”
With recognition have come some critics who use words like “stick people” and “pandering” to refer to Moss’s work.
“A stick figure in terms of iconography reminds people of a deeper meaning,” contends Rippe, “and the Amish are symbols of a type. An Amish man and woman on skates conjure up images in the mind.”
And when critics attack Moss for her simplicity, Rippe suggests they go deeper and consider the iconographic meanings.
“Some of her most significant pieces come from early in her career when she painted more in academic styles,” says Rippe. He mentions an art project from the Cooper Union, Thomas Aquinas’s Book of Man, for which she made the paper, illustrated in gold leaf, and did the calligraphy. It’s now on display at the museum.
“The same thing is in some of her landscapes, the mystery of a winter day, the silence of a winter day, where you can’t figure out where the horizon line is,” says Rippe.
“At times, when she overworks a theme– the Amish theme– it almost becomes…” Rippe hesitates. “I don’t want to say… trite.”
Despite this observation, Rippe points out that for a modest amount, it’s possible to own a piece of her art or a good reproduction. He recalls walking around a tony West End neighborhood in Richmond. “It was amazing the number of her pieces hanging in living rooms over the fireplace…. the Amish skaters.”
Rippe concedes the Amish skaters are not his favorites, and speculates they’re “not hers, either. In her home are hung the pieces with silence and mystery.”
And Moss has her own theory about her popularity.
“I think it’s a communication,” says Moss. “It’s a value thing. I love these lines. I love what I do.” And so do her employees.
Now offered in 400 galleries around the country, Moss’s work generates $10 to $15 million a year and keeps 30 people employed, the president of her company estimates.
Home again
Charmed by the black contour of a bird in a photograph she shows to a visitor, Moss says she incorporated the image into her painting commemorating Jamestown when “all they wanted was three ships.”
Besides maintaining P. Buckley Moss Galleries Ltd., Moss is a major philanthropic force with her art. She’s donated her works to WVPT for decades to raise money for the station.
The P. Buckley Moss Foundation was created in Moss’s honor to support dyslexic and learning-disabled children by promoting art in the schools.
“She’s convinced art is what saved her with her dyslexia,” says Jake Henderson. And when school budgets are slashed, art in the classroom is one of the first things to go.
So how does she combine being a philanthropist with her art empire, as well as the six children and 10 grandchildren, at an age when many would be scaling back their activities?
“You do the things that suit you,” Moss says, “that you care about. I don’t want kids to have a hard time learning. I had a hard time learning.”
And she credits others who help her to help. If someone gives her a watering can, “I’ll decorate it and it’ll go for a couple of hundred dollars,” she says. “I do my thing, they do theirs.”
More than anything, Pat Moss is successful in doing her thing. “I don’t fit in anywhere,” she says, but she’s adored by fans all over the country.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a dark side,” says Moss. “I’ve had lots of bad things happen.”
She stands outside the Barn under a cherry tree where weeds are coming up and shares a couple of juicy stories that, regrettably, are off the record. “It’s not perfect,” she says of the tree– or is she referring to her life?– “I love it.”
And the woman who once felt her art wasn’t taken seriously because of her gender has the last laugh.
“I can do what I want,” she says.
Pat Moss puts visitors in a cottage so she can work at night rather than put up walls inside the Barn.
PHOTO BY BILLY HUNT
Her dyslexia kept her from reading music, so Pat Moss is self-taught– but she doesn’t sound like it when she plays her Steinway.
PHOTO BY BILLY HUNT
The P. Buckley Moss Museum in Waynesboro is a repository of her oeuvre and a mecca for Moss aficionados.
PHOTO BY BILLY HUNT
Source: http://www.readthehook.com/85713/cover-horsing-around-p-buckley-moss-and-not-folk-art
In 1995, Moss founded the P. Buckley Moss Foundation for Children’s Education to aid children with learning disabilities.
Source: http://www.pbuckleymoss.com/about10.html
“I did something when so many told me I wouldn’t amount to anything,” said P. (Patricia) Buckley Moss, a name painter based in Blacksburg, Va. “I am still doing and never gonna stop.”
Besides being known for her paintings of rural landscapes and life in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Moss has become the voice of the underdog. She is also a breast cancer survivor; cancer free 33 years.
This is Moss’ way of giving back to women who need it the most, through an organization (PALS — Positive Attitude Love and Support) that is focused 100 percent on healing women.
Moss is equally known for her dedicated work with special education groups and her donations to children-related charities. She gives much of her time and effort to helping others.
“Charity auctions are important to her,” said Maria Bereket, social media marketing coordinator. “Her foundation (The Moss Foundation) takes the money they receive and supports teachers and students who help learners who learn in different ways. Half of the proceeds from the quilt auction will go to the Moss Foundation. The other half goes to PALS because Pat survived breast cancer, and like her learning disabilities, she overcame cancer. Her art has given her the voice not only to be creative but also a means and a vehicle to support and help others.”
Patricia Buckley’s grew up in the Richmond Borough of New York City (now known as Staten Island). Although viewed as a poor student due to dyslexia, a grade school teacher said Pat was artistically gifted. Her mother enrolled her in the Washington Irving High School for the Fine Arts, in Manhattan, where her artistic abilities were nourished.
In 1951 she received a scholarship to New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she spent four years specializing in fine arts and graphic design. Then Buckley married Jack Moss, a chemical engineer.
In 1964, Jack took his family, with their sixth child soon to be born, to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Pat loved the rural scenery and respected the intense religious Amish and Mennonites. She integrated this into her art.
The first PALS support group meeting was March 18, 1991. In 1993 PALS approached Laura DeRamus, owner of the Canada Goose Gallery that has the country’s largest inventory of Moss Art, requesting that they team up with P. Buckley Moss to do fund raising for their support group.
PALS for Life support group meetings are held the third Monday of the month at 6:30 p.m. Call Joan Schuermann 937-435-1923 or Lois Keil 937-299-0257.
Dayton Daily News – Shirley Belcher
October 2016
Source: http://www.daytondailynews.com/lifestyles/renown-painter-cherishes-her-pals/3VoaN0hGU7tM9mPZDLB9vL/