Published Material

In the chapter on Community, the Author is talking about the particular community shown in this painting. (Pages 126/127)

Liz Moon – global traveller, local artist

Liz Moon first started participating in Open Studios in 1989 and continued every year, up to and including 2005, when family circumstances intervened. I visited her at home and was able to admire the many examples of her unique paintings, whilst exploring how she became an Open Studios artist.

It had always been Liz Moon’s mother’s ambition to go to art school but Liz was both visual and mathematical and wanted to be an architect instead. Although she enjoyed art, she had to give it up at ‘A’ level and continued with maths and physics. This led to Liz going to Oxford to read for an engineering degree. There she was one of three, post-war pioneering women, who were part of a 50:50 mix of students coming fresh to university and more mature students coming out of national service. Interested in industrial design, she completed her degree in the early 1960s.

Her brother was working in Malaysia at the time and in 1964 found her a job at a palm oil factory, in a country that had just gained its independence the previous year. She took on the correspondence relating to the installation of all the machinery, at a time when the company was having fraught relations with the client, Unilever. Not knowing how to approach the issue, she resorted to writing “frightfully polite letters” and the strategy resulted in a better atmosphere and a smoother running company.

Infected by a wanderlust, Liz boarded a boat for a three-week trip from Singapore to Australia and New Zealand where she took on a variety of temporary jobs. Liz then flew on to the US to become a poorly paid engineer, working in a factory that made pipes and drains for flyovers. This was 1965, just before the famous song by Scott McKenzie would make San Francisco the flower-power capital of the world. The US had become embroiled in the Vietnam war and, as part of the war effort, Liz worked on a project to design a floating platform that would allow the fuelling of ships at sea. She wryly notes that when it was delivered for use: “The people installing it didn’t tighten the nuts they were supposed to in time – and it sank!” Fortunately, it was recovered and used later. At that time, Liz began taking an evening course at the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 1969, Liz returned to the UK, via a roundabout route. She first went to Saigon (during the Vietnam War) to visit a friend, stopped off at Cambodia, (before the Khmer Rouge) and then travelled on to India. She had taken along some paints, thinking they were watercolours, but they turned out to be acrylics. Fortunately, they were of a good quality and she experimented and learnt to paint in transparent layers. Liz found that she used her memory of sights like a grid, and this helped her develop her own style of painting, which included an interest in horizons.

Back in the UK, Liz initially worked on aircraft at Marshalls in Cambridge, but the hours were long as the company was going through a transition. She saw an ad for a part-time job at the university’s Radio Astronomy group which just required her ‘A’ levels. She recalls: “The only entertainment then at Marshalls was walking to the post office in Fen Ditton and back. On the way, I saw a car number plate leaning against the cemetery boundary. It contained every one of my engineering numbers, my brother’s initials and the clocking-in number at Marshalls. I saw this as a hint to stop being an engineer!”. Liz joined the Radio Astronomy group.

Now that she had more time to paint, in 1971/72 Liz joined the Cambridge Drawing Society, and met an interesting mix of professional and amateur artists. She started to exhibit more widely, mainly working on images of people in movement, musicians, people at play and sport. In a London exhibition, a sailing painting even got a mention in The Times!

Part of her time was spent studying natural sciences at the Open University, and then training as a Primary School teacher. She taught full and part time in villages around Cambridge.

It was during the Thatcher era that Liz was able to buy her house, (via a special deal for the over 40s!). Her neighbour was an evening class organiser at Chesterton School. He enjoyed her work, and offered her a chance to teach an adult evening class in Art. Her Primary School training proved very useful. To encourage people to relax and get involved, Liz would often demonstrate techniques sitting on the floor, so everyone could gather round and watch.

One day she was driving around the corner to her house and saw an Open Studios sign. This was during the Cambridge Music Festival period in 1989. Liz joined the meetings, “In a dark room at a neighbour’s!” and remembers Olive Mayo and Jill Ogilvy. At first, Liz found the idea of having people come into her house quite scary, but she began exhibiting and worked out a way to always greet people as they came in, and to demonstrate and interact with the visitors. She recalls the additional exhibitions that would precede or accompany Open Studios at the Music School and Kettle’s Yard, as well as displays in City shop windows.

Liz is mentioned by a number of the long-standing artists. For her it was simply enjoyable to meet up with others and keep in touch. She was cited as one of the artists contributing to the success of the 1996 participation year.

Liz participated in Open Studios for all of the seventeen years from 1989 to 2005, after which she had to give up COS as her partner became too ill and needed to be looked after.

She is still doing art at home, using a clay knife now instead of a paintbrush or pen.

From ‘The History of Cambridge Open Studios’ by Chris Thomas, ISBN 978-1-911526-34-6. Available as a limited edition print from Cambridge Open Studios https://camopenstudios.org/about/ or in digital form at https://archive.org/details/cos-book-complete-with-covers-2021-03-31 .