Visitors to Andrew Moore’s former studio/former gallery are greeted by a metal pan piled with clots of dried paint that sits on the porch railing next to his door. He calls it “my color mountain,” the scrapings from cleaning his palette at the end of the day. It seems a whimsical display for an artist known for his meticulous paintings.
Inside, paintings are hung and leaned everywhere, as varnish dries on some, set into frames that are also made by the artist, to be stained or painted to perfectly complement each painting. Andrew is preparing for his solo show at the Granary Gallery that opens this Sunday, August 9. He last exhibited at the Granary in the late 1980s, before building his own gallery next to his home in Harthaven. For 24 years it served as his studio in the winter and gallery in the summer. Now he is ready to turn it back into a full-time studio. “At 53, I realized the time it takes to run a gallery takes away from what I really wanted, which was to paint. As you get older you realize time is the most valuable possession,” says Andrew.
And time we took. Two painters sitting together in an art-filled room talking about what we do. The language of making art, of looking at the world around you as elements in a composition, designing pictures in your mind.
Although Andrew’s paintings appear very precise and “photographic” in the sense of being carefully rendered and polished, of a recognizable place, they are really designed to serve the idea in his mind. That idea can take years to become a finished painting, pieced together from observation of any variety of components — a section of landscape, a piece of wood or stone, patterns of light, a dead bird or other animal in his studio — all put together in a series of drawings that underlie the final design. The final drawing is blown up to the decided-upon size and shape, then transferred to the canvas as simplified shapes rendered in a sepia underpainting. “No details, positive and negative space, the design of the painting.” he says of his approach. Then the layering of colors begins.
Andrew made a video of the painting “Hannah” as it progressed. You can watch it on his website, agmoore.com, under “The Process.” It’s a portrait of his daughter. It took her whole life to paint. He waited until Hannah was no longer a little girl, so that people seeing her at 40 would know it was her. His idea was of a painting that would evoke her childhood. She is posed out of doors, under an umbrella Andrew had and planned all along to use. The daffodils they planted together when she was 6, the path she walked to school, the ocean in the distance, the gray of the white oaks surrounding their house are all there. Hannah has become an artist herself, and Andrew sees her studying him and making compositions in her head from her artist’s perspective, just as he was painting her.
There are several small paintings of the Gannon and Benjamin boatyard, of men working on a wooden whaleboat. Andrew happened into the shop and watched them working on this boat, documenting their progress with photographs and drawings throughout the winter and late spring of 2013. The paintings came later, finished over the past two years. The dog, Zephyr, was always there, covered in wood shavings; the tool box and set of chisels; the hull bottom-up through the first half of construction, then flipped over; the bit of landscape through the windows. A large painting of the finished whaleboat completed the series, and is the centerpiece in his upcoming show.
Another painting is of a northern gannet he came upon while returning from fishing off Cape Pogue. Some of the feathers on its wings had been damaged, allowing Andrew to get close enough to take a series of photographs. “All the time it was making this wild, primordial noise,” said Andrew. The bird was depicted with its beak open. A fishing trip weeks later provided the undulating ocean and light patterns in the water, the Aquinnah Cliffs and shrubbery in the background. A school of tinker mackerel, an up-Island bait fish, was placed in the foreground, an imagined addition to strengthen the composition. The process of fishing and designing the painting, then in the studio making drawings to work out the major movement, became “the abstract underpinning of the whole thing.”
“Snowflakes” is a magical concoction of just that, snowflakes falling, every one different, as they are in nature. The view is of Keith Farm. Snow is still falling over an almost-covered stone wall, the remains of bittersweet vines and berries a spot of color in the foreground. Andrew’s idea was of a painting “as magic as the planet can get, of gray sky and snow falling, the feeling a child might have on Christmas Eve.” He spoke of the softening and obscuring of the treeline, overpainting it again and again. “The idea is important. Detail isn’t the important thing. Sacrifice detail for the painting.” Make sure to look at it up close.
And on we went, talking, looking. I came away with a greater understanding of what these paintings are, not photographic renderings, but the carefully constructed compositions of a keen observer and craftsman.
Andrew Gordon Moore, Paintings from the Coast 2015, the Granary Gallery, West Tisbury. Sunday, August 9, through Saturday, August 22. Artist’s reception will be held Sunday, August 9, from 5 to 7 pm.
