The Aliveness She Didn't Know Was A Thing

There’s a question that tends to arrive quietly, usually on a Sunday, somewhere in the middle of a life that looks complete from the outside. Is this all there is?

Yvonne Moore asked it through most of her forties. She had the big house, the big job, the money, the holidays. The question didn’t care. It kept showing up anyway.

When I sat down with her for this episode of GRACEWorks, she had a good deal less of all that. A marriage had ended. Her father had died. And somewhere in the middle of it, at a loose end after dinner one evening while her boys played on their Xboxes, she was scrolling Instagram and watched paint pour across a canvas. She bought a few tubes. She made a mess. And she found something she says she had no idea even existed.

To now have not all of that stuff, but to have a question that enlivens me, that is such a gift.

What struck me, talking to her, is that the aliveness was never really in the painting. It was in what she was willing to ruin to find it.

She paints something, hates it, washes the brushes, walks out, shuts the studio door. And half an hour later she’s back, attacking the canvas, because it’s already spoiled so it no longer matters what she does to it. That, she says, is when something that actually feels like her shows up.

Most of us do the opposite. We grip harder. We want the alive thing without the mess that lets it in.

We covered a lot of ground. The barefoot child who made potions out of grass and lived in worlds of her own invention, long before she would have called any of it art. The permission her serial-entrepreneur father handed her without meaning to, that you don’t have to do one thing for a whole life. The daily dance of freedom and containment with two teenage sons. And why, while preparing for her first solo show, she quietly swapped one word for another.

It’s an invitation, not an exhibition. If I can do this, there are lots of other people who can do this.

That line has stayed with me. So much of what keeps people out of their own creativity is the reverence, the sense that making things is a serious business for other, more qualified people. Yvonne is taking down the velvet rope.

If you listen to one thing this week, make it this. And when you’re done, sit with her question for a moment.

Not the despairing one from her forties. The other one. What next?

About Yvonne Moore

Yvonne Moore is an Irish artist who came to painting in 2022, in her mid-fifties, working largely with acrylic pouring and abstract landscape. She has just successfully completed her first solo show, and she is refreshingly clear that if she can do this, so can plenty of other people.

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