Moyra has lived in many places in her life:

Many, many years ago, when I was but a fluff-headed blonde, and had not gained the wisdom of my elective red-headedness, I lived in Geneva, Switzerland, where I was acquainted with a Venezuelan op artist.  His canvases not only played games with geometric optics, like Vasarely´s, they also had actual, real, dimensional texture, as the canvas itself was geometrically twisted and interwoven.

That visual memory percolated down the years and was filtered through this odd grey light, inspired by the 15 inches of rain that fell on Saturday, October 17, 1998, in Austin, Texas, where I now reside (From the Op-ulent Greys Set).

She has already mentioned Latin America, Geneva, and Austin.  The signposts in the Celeste auf der Infobahn interface, which I believe represent places Moyra has lived, are:  Austin (Texas), Fort Walton Beach (Florida), Washington, DC, Buenos Aires (Argentina), Geneve (Geneva, Switzerland), Amsterdam, Lugano (Switzerland), London and Paris.

Moyra was trained in fine art and at one time supported herself by writing, but quit after a disastrous hard drive crash (from the Bookish Set):

...in 1995, I lost two books (nothing too thrilling - one was astrological, t'other metaphysical) I had written to an irrecuperable machanical hard drive failure. Seriously. The tape drive I had backed the books up on also failed irrecuperably. Because all there was in print were the sample chapters, it turned out to be one of those blows of fate that changes your life forever.

I taught myself to paint with pixels, not pastel chalk and words.

I stopped writing entirely since then, except in my own diaries and for clients.

About her work she says, "I have a Libra Moon, Taurus rising and Venus exactly conjunct the north Node and exactly trine the ascendant.... I hear Her [Venus], therefore I bejewel the Web ;->" (from the Libra Set).

Her favorite color:  "...if there is one color that soothes and exhilarates my spirit more than any other, it is probably turquoise blue. Oddly, even though the shade of turqoise I adore, a much darker, richer and more piercing hue, comes across perfectly in silk clothing and other "real" objects, there is as yet NO digital equivalent of it" (from the Turquoisine Set).

Things that make her happy:  "a bird of paradise plant with a tiny cockatoo in a beautiful handpainted mexican pot, a book of exquisite poems about birds by Pablo Neruda, a choklit bunny wrapped in purple foil and a box of Godivas" (from the Apassionata Set).

About her love of web design:  "Its eternally engrossing and entertaining for me to come up with fresh ways to display and lay out web pages, and interesting and usable site navigation schemes. Additionally, I have a weird color combination fetish (as if you hadn't noticed ;-> )" (from the Purplexed interface).

"I have a fascination for tribal motifs, especially from the Celtic and Maori cultures. There are a lot of elements within Art Nouveau that are strongly remininscent of those two cultures" (from the Tribal Nouveau Set).

One of the ways she made a living from her art was through creating futuristic-looking interface designs.  "...I can pretty much make abstract interfaces in my sleep (I make these for a living for programs and extended play music CDs)..." (from the TechnoAbstracta interface).

She tells us in her interview on SiteWorks that in 1997 she found herself stuck in the creation of endless navy and grey images for the corporate world, "when my own tastes tended to run into the more elaborate and illustration oriented."  Her corporate work included "entire online areas for America Online, illustrations for nation-wide ad campaigns, book and cd covers, corporate identity design, interfaces for programs and for the Web and countless gigabytes of graphics for web sites."  She adds,

I also took a really good look at what little was out there as far as web graphics were concerned, and decided there was ample room for me to create a "linkware" web graphics site with images that would function as my "walking advertisements". The intention of "Moyra's Web Jewels" was simply to pull in clients who were interested in my services as an artist and illustrator with a more elaborate range of imagery than what was and is common on the web.

As we all know, it worked.

Whatever Moyra may have revealed about herself in her Musings and News pages is lost, since only one of each has been saved on webarchive.org.  The Musings contained Moyra's personal views on a variety of things, as well as some information about herself and her household.  I did not read the Musings very often, being more interested in the art than in the Artiste, and so cannot fill out this section with any additional information she may have shared there.  Perhaps someone else can contribute more.

Finally, what we know about Moyra is that she is a very private person, easily touched and easily hurt.  There are signs in her Web Jewels writing that she perhaps rushed too quickly into passionate closeness with new friends, and perhaps equally quickly, rushed backwards when the too-soon intimacy led to misplaced trust and hurt feelings.  This is only my own impression -- and it's from afar, since I did not know Moyra personally.

Moyra began with the simplest of web designs, rectangles and circles (the Marble Set and One World Set), continued through all of the fads of the day (technological interfaces and various styles of buttons on backgrounds), putting her own personal stamp on the Internet in the process by creating extremely realistic- looking metals and gems.  Eventually she went on to paintings, used as interfaces, which was what she most preferred to do.  She had done everything she had set out to do.  She had bejeweled the Web, her Web Jewels had surrounded the globe and brought her plenty of business, and she was now creating both what she loved to create along with her business creations.

Why did Moyra leave the Internet?  I don't know, but I believe that she had come to the end of an era.  At that point, the Web Jewels may well have become more of a burden than an asset.  She did not need the advertising any longer (see the page on Moyra where she is quoted as saying she created the Web Jewels as a means of free advertising).

She was too busy with paid work to keep creating them (hence her long hiatus), and she was wasting a good deal of her energy pursuing misuse of her copyrights (as were some of her Jewel Miners).  It is probable that she did not have the means to hire lawyers to pursue these violations all over the globe, nor could she stand the idea of just letting it happen, so she removed the Web Jewels.  Problem(s) solved.

Sadly, her gain is our loss.  Goodbye, Moyra.  You are missed!

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