SOLO EXHIBITION | JACKSON, WY
Altamira Fine Art Jackson is pleased to present a new exhibition for lansdcape painter Robert Moore.
Please join us for an Artist Reception Friday, September 10th from 5-8pm and meet the artist.
PROGRESSIONS
Harmony—a palpable characteristic of Robert Moore’s canvases—guides the colorblind painter from the get-go. So much so in fact, he assigns notes to certain colors in his palette as a way to achieve the vibrant landscapes he paints but he cannot quite see. “I’ve been trying to align the 12 steps of the color wheel with the 12 notes of the octave,” he says. “I’m exploring what it will look like if I use musical parallels and shift my colors according to what a key might look like. It’s my way of producing order.”
Order rich with emotion. While studying at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, Moore took an instructor’s advice to heart: If you are painting an ice cream cone, don’t paint the dessert itself, paint how it tastes, how it feels on a hot summer day. So now, when Moore approaches an aspen stand, he paints the sensation of standing amid the quaking leaves, under their dappled umbrella. “I am after that effect, that richness of values. I can sense the presence of beautiful colors.”
The symphonic metaphor courses through his practice. Like a composer, he focuses on sequencing: painting flat, he works the underpainting with washes to achieve luminosity in the final layers. Squirting paint on his drawing, he calculates the mixtures required to achieve the visual intensity he desires. In this careful yet intuitive process of composing, his instruments matter greatly: “When I use a brush, it turns the paint into a single note. But when I use a knife, I lay down a chord of colors with one dominate hue. One note is not as rich as a chord. I am trying to achieve the unified diversity of nature.”
Anchored in faith, Moore considers his art an extension of his connection with nature, a relationship encapsulated by his paraphrasing of a line in the Bible: “The Lord hides certain things and then it’s our pleasure and opportunity to seek them out. There is a simple yet complex order everywhere in nature. I go out and try to understand the variety within the simple design of dark and light shapes. I hope my paintings strike a chord with the beauty people see in creation. I hope they give people a taste of the complexity found in nature.”
Pre-sales available. Contact the gallery, (307) 739-4700 | connect@altamiraart.com.