Constance Moore Simon (1947-2021) earned an MFA from Syracuse University and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. For many years, she worked in the black-and-white media of graphite and charcoal. In 1995, she started working with colored pencils and developed a new passion for color that led her to begin painting. She spent the next 20 years working with gouache paint, exploring the expressive potential of both color and brushstroke. Connie exhibited her work for 50 years in solo and group shows across the country. She was the recipient of an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Delaware State Arts Council in 1993. Her charcoal drawings were featured in an article in the February 1997 issue of American Artist Magazine entitled “Devoted to Drawing” (1997 BPI Communications). In 2000, she earned Signature Membership in the Colored Pencil Society of America. More recently, she was included in the 2002 Mid-Atlantic Edition of New American Paintings. Connie was a beloved professor and curriculum designer at the Delaware College of Art and Design for 20 years.
From still life to geometric abstraction: The subject matter of Connie's still-life pieces were small, natural, and man-made objects such as paper clips, shells, spoons, leaves, coat hangers, and buttons. She often depicted her tiny subjects much larger than life to draw attention to them and to express how exciting they were to her. Her choice of subject matter had no political, narrative, or symbolic meaning. She simply celebrated the ordinary. In fact, Connie was more interested in the design, color, shape, light, shadow, and scale that she saw in insignificant little objects than in any other kind of meaning. In her later years, her interest in composition and pattern led her to be as interested in the settings of her still life as in the objects. Her goal was to present the most ordinary objects in contexts in which they would be transformed and made worthy of sustained contemplation.
Attracted to non-Western traditions of textiles and crafts—African kente cloth, Islamic tiles, kilim rugs, and Nepalese quilts—Connie began to merge the influence of their strong two-dimensional patterns and vibrant colors with the forms from her earlier three-dimensional representational work to create her Grid Series. In her studies, Simon was influenced by painter William Bailey and printmaker Peter Milton, as well as Persian and Indian miniature painting and illuminated medieval manuscripts. As her practice developed, these interests fused with American Op-Art (“with its geometry and spatial illusions”) and her fascination with textiles. Simon found that “the flat patterns and expressive colors” in these seemingly disparate disciplines “gave me confidence to pursue pattern and colors as ends in themselves without subject, conceptual theories, or social meaning.” By eventually eliminating representational objects from her paintings, she could focus on capturing and distilling her reactions to the colors, light, and patterns around her in a less literal way, inferring rather than describing. Connie viewed the world as consisting of dimension and space and sought to capture the true form of what was visible, working from direct observation. She simplified and amplified objects and shapes, using scale to draw the viewer into an intimate space where the tiny and mundane became inspiring and monumental.