Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

- Rainer Maria Rilke,

German lyric poet (1875-1926)

One of a recognizable, yet small, cache of local plein air or, outdoor, painters living and working in Fort Wayne, Karen Moriarty stands out as an inner-directed, Zen-like chronicler of the outdoors and the subtleties of nature who has found success in several other areas of expression. Her impressionist portraits of gardens and natural scapes are widely collected and appreciated along with her painted portraits and lithe nudes, but she also charts places in unconventional directions as she has within her own life.

Nicknamed “Apple” by friends because of her affinity and predilection to flora and phototropism, the sixty-ish Moriarty renders what she sees with an accurate eye and an intuitively, deft technique. The girl’s got “hand,” as they say.

“Some things are directed simply by the medium,” she says of her various works that encompass commercial, graphic and illustrative works which even include courtroom-driven pieces. “If you’ve got charcoal or a prisma colored pencil in your hand, you’re directed to scale down the vision. On the other hand, with a brush and an oil palette, your canvas and vision expands from being finger- and wrist-rendered to the kinetic sweep of the whole arm.

“Gardens, flowers, the woods, the human figure, they all attract my attention because they are of nature. They each contain lines and elements that are simple, elegant and sometimes they are even organically complex.”

What appeals to me more than the substance of Moriarty’s work is the style and sub text which influences and guides its creation. Her intuitive hand, or line, evokes a kind of rhythmic gesture, as when she paints flowers that appear to glow from within as they sway in the wind, reflecting the changing sunlight. When she draws nudes her hand seems more of an exact, life-form tracing than an interpretation. She’s able to incorporate the energy of the animate.

“It’s about getting it right,” Moriarty says, “and that is a matter of training, vision and centering.”

To explain her point the artist gives an example of a Japanese artist she remembers from a PBS show. He is pictured standing silent, stoic and still before a canvas.

“He stood there, reverent and meditative, for more than a moment - his landscape or target in crisp focus. Then he bowed, hand-clasped to the subject. In an instant he exploded with his brush upon the canvas, and within seconds he had rendered his subject in its most minimal, essential form. The artist channeled the energy of himself and the subject within that moment, and all within the blink of an eye! I admire and aspire to that.”

Pretty heady for a girl who first discovered her talent at a birthday party in Goshen when she was five. “There was some kind of a contest at a birthday party where we were to finish a drawing in a coloring book with crayons. The setting was in a garden, and I won the first prize. I’m not sure why I won. Was it because I stayed within the lines or because I went out of the lines? I still think about that. It brought me a kind of recognition and encouragement, and I’ve never really stopped.”

After high school, where she edited the school yearbook and learned about the processes of publishing, writing and editing, she ended up at the Fort Wayne Art School, where she studied under Noel Dusenchon, John Ross, Russell Oettel, Ruth Gibson and Forrest Stark.

From then up to the present Moriarty continues to work variously as a freelance graphic designer, interior designer and television courtroom artist, all the while plying her paintings and drawings through the Castle Gallery, Artlink, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and via word-of-mouth.

Throughout her freelance career Moriarty has dwelt on the leading edge of technology, and her experience and knowledge provides a living testament to the modern evolution of the graphic arts.

“People today aren’t aware of the processes we went through to produce printed projects,” Moriarty says. “It’s simply amazing what has evolved over a couple of decades. What can be accomplished today with a mere couple of keystrokes used to entail buckets of hours of tedious hand-cutting with a mat knife [one for each of four color separations] or hand-setting type [individual letters were applied either by cutting them out of a sheet and positioning them or applying them via transfers]. Obviously it has become easier, more accessible to many, but I still, in certain circumstances, choose to do my logos with LetrasetĆ.”

Moriarty’s lush paintings of today (Foster Park, Lakeside and private gardens) seem derivative of a master like Cezanne, but other self-admitted influences in composition and style can be traced to her former Fort Wayne Art School teacher Oettel and the California painter Richard Diebenkorn.

The artist also pays homage to two diverse modern women painters, Jennifer Bartlett and Joan Mitchell, although to my mind it is hard to find a direct connection between the three of them. But then that’s Moriarty and a part of her own surprising nature. It’s one of her traits to always be between things. Not a bad place to be for it is in that realm that things come together, exchange and expand.

As one would imagine, Moriarty is a founding Three Rivers Food Co-Op member, frequents the Cinema Center and confesses to liking all music. She listens to Julia Meek on WBOI, plays old editions of the Beatles and Rolling Stones along with Ella Fitzgerald and currently enjoys all “those breathy, angry, feminist girls” who talk the talk.

In her latest incarnation Moriarty has embarked on a new avenue that uses found objects like wooden framed windows on which she paints flowery scenes on the glass that incorporate the frames as well.