Orbits, 1934

Carrie Moyer: One of the things I really like about it is the ambiguity of the space in the painting. And it's something I'm interested in my own work, too.

Narrator: Artist Carrie Moyer discusses this painting, Orbits.

Carrie Moyer: And so we focus on the central form, which are these seemingly traces of the orbits of these stars. But actually, we're looking at this kind of layered atmosphere, where there's perhaps a mountain top at the top. And then at the bottom, there's another mountain top. Or this stuff is sitting on top of a cloud. And this is an opening into the cloud. So we have all these different kinds of relationships to space that are presented in this extremely soft, dreamy way.

The word “silence” is something that she uses a lot, either in titles or in some of the quotes I've read by her. And it feels like these become these kind of iconic images in which our mind might become silenced—not in a negative way—or quieted. So thinking about these stars as this kind of activity that's captured inside of the frame. Nothing goes outside of the frame: that's another quality of religious art from all different kinds of belief systems. So we are contained inside the cranium of the orbiting stars moving inside this mountain top or whatever that is.