narrative
A Narrative
I was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1942 and always drew. By high school graduation I'd had work published in little literary magazines, and figured ‘drawing’ was what I’d do. Growing up in southern California I had some experience with desert peaks as well as the beach [another spacious landscape] but not until my mid-twenties was I introduced to the deserts of the North which came to occupy so much of my attention. At Stanford University (1960-64), however, I was encouraged in my painting efforts by Matt Kahn and, later, Keith Boyle. The work soon gravitated to the landscape-based abstraction which has remained its primary focus. At Yale for one year in the M.F.A. Program (1964-65) I studied with Jack Tworkov and then remained in New Haven to make paintings and participate in light and sound experiments with originating members of the Pulsa Group until 1966, when I returned to California, eventually establishing a studio on the coast north of Los Angeles where in 1967 and 68 I made a series of paintings characterized by multiple desert/coastal horizons set within brilliant monochrome fields of color.
I returned to New Haven and worked with Pulsa through the winter of 1968-69, then moved to San Francisco, painting houses while struggling to carve out sufficient time for painting paintings. Soon after settling there I began my “voyages of exploration” [1970-84] into northern Nevada and eventually southeastern Oregon, becoming familiar with what turned out to be a wide range of fairly unknown but to my mind gorgeous territory. I investigated the high deserts throughout the seventies, making two or more trips a year in vehicles specially modified for that purpose. During this period my work was shown frequently in the Bay Area; its imagery progressed from multiple to single horizons, often stretching across multiple canvases, becoming refined to a point where it felt confined; by mid-decade I was less interested in it. As I searched out new approaches public interest waned, which has its advantages (none of them remunerative). Sourcing photographs from the desert trips and other travels I painted aerial landscapes which mutated into cartoonish abstraction and back again to landscapes with larger flatter areas of color and the odd architectural presence, all between 1977 and 1982.
Aside from a trip to Nepal during the aerial landscape phase, working visits to the east in 1981-82, summers in Italy during the mid-eighties and a fortuitous residency in Chalon-sur-Saone, France in 1991 [where, struggling with the alien bucolia of the French Landscape, I began doing watercolors], I lived and worked full time in northern California until 1985.
Since then I have also spent three to five months a year in Nevada, initially at a renovated radar facility near Winnemucca, making modestly scaled slowly wrought oil paintings much closer to the actual landscape than the larger plainer-planar [but never plein-aire] acrylics from California, and presently at a wildlife refuge [of sorts] on the Smoke Creek Desert. The various kinds of work from these places, with their common concerns of light, silence and the paint itself are nonetheless subtly distinct, and consequently nourish each other constantly.
In 1988 the sculptor Linda Fleming and I established studios in a warehouse in the Mission district of San Francisco, working there until 2000. Throughout that time I have also made work at her studio in the mountains of southern Colorado two or so months each year. I continue to do larger paintings and more complex projects in California, currently in Benicia but from 1969-2000 in various San Francisco neighborhoods, savory or unsavory, depending.
In the mid-nineties I made groups of paintings addressing the war in the Pacific, the Pacific Ocean itself, and also revisited an ongoing project involving imaginary indigenous architecture. Many of these have been exhibited, as well as, later, a wall installation of some 100 ink and wash drawings of imagined secret military installations collectively titled "Test Area" at Refusalon in San Francisco in 1998. The work from the rural studios remains consistent with the landscape concerns, both acrylics and the annual “wall of watercolors” from Wall Spring [which typically consists of 80 – 100 watercolor triptychs documenting the look of the locale each day spent there in any given year].
Throughout the Bushwhack era, which pretty much coincided with our initial Benicia residency, an irksome concern with war and politics re-insinuated itself, first provoking a series of scatological cartoons known as “Demockery” or “With Liberty and Justice for Oil” [Oct.-Nov. 2001] and then, from 2004 – 2009, the “Pacific Theatre Paintings”; images from vintage photos of WW2 realistically rendered but tinted in colors of, um, horrific nostalgia. More recently I’ve included a few from Korea, but maybe it will end soon. Like maybe the neverending War will end soon, too.
In general, however, the great majority of the work itself addresses light, space, and memory, anchored by more than thirty years of rattling around the desert and living to tell the tale. Being personal that way, it's bound to mean different things to different people, and more, probably, to people who've been out there. For me, nevertheless, these pale semi-abstracted hazy landscapes of memory, thirty years of memory in the Great Basin, remain my primary focus.
Benicia, CA
March 2009
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© michael s. moore 2009