Moira Crone

Artist Statement

Moira Crone's oeuvre includes figurative oils and watercolors as well as mixed media and collage. A narrative thread runs through many of her works-- sometimes intended at the beginning, and sometimes discovered in the process, and enhanced through choices of materials and images.
She arrived at painting after a long career of writing and teaching fiction. In two of her published novels the protagonist is a woman painter. She is inspired by the complexities of sound and sights in New Orleans where she lives, as well as many masters including Romare Bearden, Robert Rauschenberg, always, the European Expressionists and the American Neo-Expressionists. Her work is a conversation between rendering and discovery. She deploys erasure and overpainting, and the practice of using many kinds of supports and a wide variety of collage elements including upholstery fabric, wrapping papers, handmade Japanese and Nepalese papers, and inkjets prints of her own photos and watercolors. Often she finds a story in her work and adds elements to enhance emerging meaning, or she begins with a narrative.
Inspired by the vividness and architecture of her environs in Bywater, New Orleans, she explores color relationships, intensities, and emotional energies, influenced by the strong presence of alternative spiritualities in its long history and wide variety of migrations in the Gulf South. In 2025, she curated a show of regional artists called "NOLA EXPRESSIONISM" at the Second Story Gallery. There she highlighted figurative and semi-abstract artists in the region whose work is driven by inner feeling and story in relationship to visual impression.
Moira Crone began her career as a storyteller, and she remains one.