This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.

Moya Aiken: Finding the Inner Artist

Moya Aiken admits she had qualms after she agreed to be the 2017 Artist in Residence at Misericordia, a Chicago facility for people with developmental disabilities. To be sure, she was by profession an artist; she had even won an Emmy for an animated graphic arts project, but the one-week residency at Misericordia demanded something different: the ability to organize an art project with aspiring artists who suffered from a range of developmental and physical challenges.

“I was really terrified. I had never worked with people with disabilities,” she says.

After a week together, Moya, and her team of artists from Misericordia created a 40-inch by 30-inch montage of individually done panels inspired by the city of Chicago. Called Patchwork, it included everything from the city’s zoo to the Chicago Cubs.

What’s more, Moya no longer had any qualms about her students.

“They were absolutely fantastic. It was unbelievable, one big love fest,” she says.

One of the participants told her she was “awesome.” Moya had no trouble returning the compliment.

“I told him he was the awesome one,” she says.

Misericordia has both residential and day programs in areas from arts to cooking and landscaping for some 600 people, covering the age spectrum from children to senior citizens. For the past two decades, art works done in Misericordia programs have been auctioned at the Art Institute of Chicago in an annual event called the Artist in All. At this year’s recently held auction, Patchwork sold for $6,000. In addition, it will be reproduced on post cards, notebooks, and other merchandise to benefit Misericordia. In total, the auction raised $118,000 for Misericordia’s programs.

The walls of Moya’s Essex studio are hung with her art; she works in pastels and acrylic though the medium she prefers is graphite. She shows a box loaded with different sizes and lengths on black pencil, which she sharpens with a surgeon’s scalpel.

“These are my soldiers, even this,” she says, holding up a nub less than a half inch long.

Her art, she explains is all about contour and movement.

“I don’t like to intellectualize. The line is what interests me,” she explains.

When people question what the drawing is, she has query for them.

“You tell me what it is,” she asks, adding, “I’m quite happy if they like it.”

Moya, Irish by ancestry, grew up in England. She describes her home in the city of Manchester as “the toughest housing project in the North of England,” but it was there she developed her passion for the United States, in the Saturday afternoon kiddie club at a local movie theater.

“People in bright sweaters, men in pants that looked so sharp, all singing around a Christmas tree. It all looked so amazing,” she says.

But there was something even more fascinating: the ring of an American telephone.

“It wasn’t anything like British telephones. I feel in love with that sound,” she says.

Moya’s path to America started at art school in London. When she graduated with a specialty in textile design, she took her nest egg, $350, and bought a one-way ticket to New York, though she had told her parents she would be back in two weeks. She had the basic equipment young travelers need: the names and telephone numbers of friends of friends on whose couches she might sleep.

Through her network of acquaintances, Moya found a job in textile design and did well enough to open her own design studio, later branching out into graphics and animation. She worked for MTV, where she met her husband Bill Aiken, then an MTV writer and producer.

Moya and Bill’s son, Liam, was born in 1990, but 2 ½ years later Bill died at the age of 34 of esophageal cancer. Casting about for a new strategy to support herself and her young son, Moya sent Liam’s picture to a modeling agency. It produced immediate results. He got nine commercials in three weeks, and soon began getting parts in movies and live theater as well.

According to Moya, Liam has appeared in some 30 productions, notably playing one of the children in Stepmom with Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon. The director of that movie, Chris Colombus, liked Liam so much that he signed him for another movie he was going to produce in England: a picture about the adventures of a now world-famous young wizard at boarding school.

Liam and Moya got to London with a movie contract, but the deal fell through because the producers felt that the movie’s star should be English. As a result, Daniel Radcliffe got the part that made him famous: Harry Potter.

In her days as a stage mom, Liam and Moya travelled the world. He went to Africa to appear in I Dreamed of Africa with Kim Basinger. Oprah Winfrey sent a private jet to pick Liam and Moya up from their home in New Jersey to take them to Chicago to appear on her show, even flying in a tutor from Los Angeles so Liam could get the required school hours while he was there.

Moya had some fixed rules about what commercials Liam could appear in: no newspaper advertisements, no local television, and no commercials with food.

“You have to chew the food and then spit it out because they do so many takes. It’s disgusting,” she explains.

She also had a standard for what kind of movie roles he could accept.

“If it had to be something he wouldn’t be embarrassed for his grandmother to see,” she says.

Now, 27, Liam pursues his career in Los Angles, but he is flying to Chicago to be with Moya at the Artist in All auction in Chicago. Moya says she loves Los Angeles, but wouldn’t want to live there all the time.

“In Los Angeles, you’d go to a premiere, it was an honor to be invited, but there were wall-to-wall people, and who wanted to talk to some middle-aged lady?” she says.

After her husband’s death, Moya bought her house in Essex, a town where Bill had relatives. For many years it was a weekend home, but four years ago, Moya decided to make it her base of operations and she is delighted in her decision.

Here she has not only made friends but also become a part of the local art scene, with exhibits in Old Lyme and Middletown.

“I have a busy social life and when I walk into a room, no one makes me feel awkward,” she says.

In addition to her paintings and drawings, she continues to do graphics, currently for newswoman Paula Zahn’s television show, On the Case.

And though Liam is a continent away, he is always in her studio. It used to be the small building where his band practiced and the doodles that they painted on the concrete floor are a constant reminder of his presence.