From Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins, Thames and Hudson, 2015
In her ongoing series 'Absent Friends' Moreton paints portraits of women who have inspired her. Singers Gillian Welch and Nina Simone and writer Rebecca West all feature, women who are celebrated primarily for their creativity rather than their bodies or fashion sense. Moreton builds each portrait using thin washes of oil, working on unprimed wookd to enable the paint to be absorbed by the panel so it physically occupies the ground. Concurrently, Moreton has also been exploring mythologies, rituals and manifestations of love, reworking Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Victorian morality as well as exploring British folklore. In her most recent series she looded as the tension in mythology between the spiritual and the animal, for example in The Love of Beasts (3) (2014). A Bacchanalian faun seems to have discovered Madame de Pompadour (by way of Fragonard) who is hiding in a glade of foliage that doubles up as a riot of abstract marks. Moreton works from photographs and historic paintings, exploring the relationship between her subject matter, the imagery she has purposefully sourced and sought-out and the materiality of paint itself.
Charlotte Mullins 2015