“and even you forgot those brilliant flashes seen from afar” -Ruth Stone

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featured artist, Issue #16

Nathaniel Moody

Night Walker, watercolor on paper

The sand is pink, the sand is dense. The roofs are painted. Sodium dwells in the ear. A woman has a black coat. Bushes from rocks, a manitu with a heavy joint. Gondolier, I cut your back, stomach, inner glory…

-from Córdoba, Tomaž Šalamun translated by Brian Henry
New Path, watercolor on paper
Hike, watercolor on paper
Diamond, colored pencil on paper
Visionary: Then I See The Magic Glowing In Her Eyes, watercolor on paper
There’s A Place In the Woods Where She Comes, watercolor on paper

…I have done the work of imagining with mine eyes and mine ears the gall forbidden, the wall unbidden, the slither of the hither in the bridge.

– from The Missing Self-Portrait of Saint Sebastian, Alina Stefanescu
Banana Trees, Night Sky, watercolor on paper
On The Path Between Places, watercolor on paper
Meeting Place, watecolor on paper

…Was always a ruin, the ruin of the mountain, of which these stones Are ruins once removed. In the white church, I light two candles, Ouijing by other means. “If you see Aristotle, tell him we need A ‘fifth cause’ for ruins,” for matter in a state of petrified dispersal, Still so pleasing to behold in this, the third eighteenth century.

– from DAYS OF 2025 by Ryan Ruby
Meeting Place, Two Sycamores, watercolor on paper
Night Walkers, colored pencil
Summer Moon, Cape Cod, watercolor on paper
Ghost Tree, watercolor on paper
Burning Bush, watercolor on paper
A hidden place, oil on canvas

The Punctum

for sarah bodri

a haiku of hydrangeas.
sat sadly at the punctum.
i offer my periphery. stop
to hear it cease. early has
already begun elsewhere.
the bird has now falsely
framed our entire bedroom.
outside the window, where
the honking ride stops to
air its tires out.

-Khashayar Mohammadi
Black Beach, White Moon, watercolor on paper

nathanieljmoody.com/

@nathanieljmoody_artist

Nathaniel Moody

Artist Statement

My work is a visual travelogue, mapping the landscapes my multiracial family and I have moved through in search of home. Along the way, I have explored themes of grief, loss, and uprootedness; the physical plane running parallel to deep emotional landscapes that shape identity. My paintings exist at the intersection of memory and place, capturing the echoes of history that linger in the land and within us.

I work in both oil and watercolor in a similar way, allowing the transparency of layers to bleed in and out of one another. This process mirrors the way memory surfaces—sometimes sharp, sometimes diffusive, always shaped by time. My paintings are often rooted in photographic reference, yet they move beyond documentation, transforming landscapes into dreamlike spaces imbued with personal and collective histories. Trees, water, and moonlit skies recur as motifs, offering both grounding and a sense of the unknown.
Portals—doorways, pathways, and openings that suggest transition, transformation, and possibility. Figures often appear on the verge of passage, standing before an entrance or moving through a liminal space. These portals act as metaphors for rites of passage, moments of decision, and opportunities for growth. They reflect both the physical movement of my family’s journey and the deeper, internal evolution that comes with searching for home.

My latest body of work follows a deeply personal search for home—not in the sense of returning to the past, but in moving forward. With my wife and children, I have traveled across landscapes that carry both personal significance and historical weight, from the Northeast to the American South and beyond. These journeys reveal shifting relationships to land, belonging, and identity. Some places feel like home, others feel haunted, and many hold the invisible presence of ancestors whose stories were never passed down.

Through this work, I continue to ask: Where did home go? And can it be found again—not in what was lost, but in what we build moving forward?

nathanieljmoody.com/
@nathanieljmoody_artist

From The Art Editor

The Green Mountains are full of an enormous number of skilled, incredible artists and artisans. One such is Nathaniel Moody, a painter who like many Vermonters (and many artists, for that matter), wears many additional hats; educator, father, farm-manager, neighbor, and more.
Multivalence, code-switching, translating, reiterating.

Nate’s work has a powerfully dream-like quality beyond the warm and glowing
palettes, that has always recalled to me the Symbolists, since first seeing his work in 2018 in the Brattleboro studio building we both worked in at the time. His deft ability to treat landscape and matter as animate events, instead of inert backgrounds and incidental objects, reveal magic and meaning where many wouldn’t bother overturning the rock, the root, the leaf in the moonlight. As comfortable in oil as in watercolor or colored pencil, Moody uses color, texture and varying opacity to build assertive, sometimes theatrical ambience and mood, and his ghostly figures and apparitions have enough embodiment for the viewer to remain curious, but lack fear in the encounter. These aren’t horror, the figures seem both remembered and invented, acting as an invitation. Through half-lidded eyes, one can see themselves in these groves, coasts, copses, clearings and meeting places.
Waiting, pondering, remembering, moving in space and time.

Most of the works included in this issue are well-observed landscapes, and true nocturnes at that. In them, there is much of the real given portrait, but also enough of the surreal and imaginary to offer possibilities beyond the limitations of our waking world. I know it creates a bit of a perfect-little-package to say so, but my hope is that this pairs well and makes more visible the kind of deadly-serious playfulness, portraiture, and dreaming at work in much of this issue’s poetry. Enjoy!
Dream, read, reflect, aspire.

-Candace Jensen, Art Editor

Artist Bio

Nathaniel J. Moody is a visual artist whose work explores themes of place, memory, and connection. He lives and works on unceded Wabenaki land (so-called Vermont). Born in 1977 to a working-class family in New Hampshire, he developed a passion for drawing at an early age and has pursued a lifelong journey in the arts. Moody earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania, an experience that broadened his perspective on culture, place, and storytelling. His work is evolving as he deepens his exploration of landscapes, history, and personal narrative through painting.

After six years of yurt living, Moody now makes his home on a nonprofit community farm along the West River (Wantastiquet), where he works as a farmer and CSA Coordinator alongside his partner, the farm’s co-director and founder. His creative practice is deeply informed by his surroundings, blending personal history with the landscapes that shape his experience. The cycles of the land, the interplay of labor and renewal, and the act of cultivating a sense of place all echo in his paintings, reinforcing his exploration of belonging and connection.

nathanieljmoody.com/
@nathanieljmoody_artist

 

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