Moats, Lillian 1946–

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Moats, Lillian 1946–

PERSONAL:

Born August 23, 1946, in Detroit, MI; father an architect; mother an artist; married J.P. Somersaulter (marriage ended); married Michael Moats, 1979; children: (second marriage) David Julian. Education: Attended Barnard College, 1964-65; University of Michigan, B.F.A., 1968; University of Wisconsin, M.S., 1970.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Downers Grove, IL.

CAREER:

Pajon Arts Ltd., Downers Grove, IL, filmmaking partner, 1973-93; self-employed artist and writer, 1993—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Special jury award (with J.P. Somersaulter), Chicago International Children's Film Festival, for body of work; more than forty other national and international film festival awards (with Somersaulter), including five awards from Chicago International Film Festival, all for art films.

WRITINGS:

(And illustrator) The Gate of Dreams (fairytales for children and adults), Cranbrook Press (Bloomfield Hills, MI), 1993, revised edition, 1996.

Legacy of Shadows (fictionalized memoir), Three Arts Press (Downers Grove, IL), 1999.

Speak, Hands (memoir), Three Arts Press (Downers Grove, IL), 2006.

Author (and artist and director, with J.P. Somersaulter) of more than twenty art films.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lillian Moats and her partner, J.P. Somersaulter, have written and directed more than twenty art films for children and adults, most of them animated. Some are original stories and others are adaptations of classical folk and fairy tales. Some have been televised by the British Broadcasting Corporation and dubbed for transmission in Europe and Scandinavia. Some are collected in the Museum of Modern Art, and others have been shown at film festivals around the world, including Australia, Scotland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, India, Yugoslavia, and Iran, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Moats once told CA: "My interests since childhood have been in art and writing. The concept of craftsmanship has been integral to both, since I was raised in a family of artists and artisans. For almost twenty years, I made animated art films as a vocation with my partner J.P. Somersaulter, while I painted portraits as an avocation. My need to write was secondary to artwork until a prolonged and severe emotional breakdown in my late twenties put me in touch with issues and themes that I could only express with enough precision in the verbal realm. Subjects too painful and personal to address outright at that time found symbolic expression in my original fairy tales.

"My personal understanding of fairy tales is built upon a foundation of insight from Bruno Bettelheim's writings. I am indebted to that renowned child psychologist and fairy tale scholar—first for writing The Uses of Enchantment for all of us—and later for encouraging me to publish my fairy tales. Three of these comprise my first book The Gate of Dreams. I illustrated The Gate of Dreams with silhouettes and (in the hardcover first edition) with oil vignettes. Artisans figure heavily in these symbolic stories. This made them particularly appropriate for publication by Cranbrook Press, which was very active in the Arts and Crafts Movement.

"There was a change in my relationship to writing in the late 1980s when I began to compose on a computer. The ease of moving sentences and paragraphs enabled me to see instantly the results of complex editing. This made writing feel much more like the visual and plastic arts which had always been more pleasurable to me in terms of process. Because of this, and because of my deepening interest in complex psychological subjects, my priorities reversed. In the last several years, writing has become what I must do. I returned to drawing and painting primarily to enhance my writing.

"My second book, Legacy of Shadows, is a fictionalized memoir that evolved from my exploration of the mysterious impact of family history on individual psychology. It traces the lives of three women whose stories indelibly blend into one during the span of three generations. My motivation for writing it was the realization that each of us is deeply directed by the legacy for unresolved emotion passed from generation to generation."

Moat later told CA: "My third book Speak, Hands picks up in time a few years after the end of Legacy of Shadows. Though both are psychological mysteries, the two books are quite different in style and focus. Speak, Hands is a deep meditation on the subjects of hands, memory, and the unconscious.

"Recently I returned to painting to express political concerns."