After completing a fine art degree in 1989, artist Mike Moor worked on farms in Wales before moving to the West Indies where he tried to live self sufficiently. In 1992 Moor returned to Europe, sailing the Atlantic on a 30’ yacht with the sole company of the captain. Experiencing life-threatening storms and hunger Moor disembarked in Spain and tramped over the following weeks to Holland where he again found farm work. These biographical details are relevant as their psychological effect has influenced and inspired subsequent work including visionary etchings expressive of awe, displacement, fear, and a religiosity brought about through such vainglorious trials.
War and conflict (including inner conflict) often resurface in Moor’s art. It became a specific theme in the 90’s following harrowing news reports from the Balkans, and as we are daily reminded of man’s inhumanity to man, the theme continues to be reflected in his images.
Self-taught or art school?
I would say both as I mainly enjoyed art school for the facilities, art history lectures and additional subjects such as sociology. My foundation course was wonderful, the tuition impassioned and you felt that making art was incredibly important and relevant. You could take life drawing all day, every day which gave me a good grounding not just in looking attentively, but also in finding ways to embody this within a more personal statement. During my Degree and Masters, tutors were reluctant to teach skills essential to an artists’ armoury, so I think of those times as mainly self-directed and self-taught.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
The prints of the 16th Century Mannerist, Jacques Bellange are wonderful. Compositionally they are ingenious and with their elongated figures have a devotional, flame-like quality. I would love to own a copy of ‘Three Martyrs at the Tomb’ which I would hang on the staircase to still me on those busy traipses through the house. If I could be greedy and own a second work, maybe Rubens’ ‘Drunken Silenus’ in all its fleshy exuberance. I find its compression, rich palette, and mayhem (barely kept in check by a sinuous composition) so life-affirming.
How would you describe your style?
Neo-expressionist (though I’m glad to say we don’t have such militant camps these days). Gritty with fantastical elements. Psychologically ambiguous with a dose of metaphor Satirical. Strange. Anthropomorphic.
Despite appearances, my prints often evolve from life studies where the focus is to capture what’s before me, so in a sense beginning as homages. The graft and resistance of the drypoint medium create the kind of craggy, spiny textures that can ground these haunting images.
My best works enliven what is often still or dead, breathing life into the bones.
Is narrative important within your work?
Narrative is very important though occurs subliminally rather than as a starting point. It is never definitive, more an invitation of possibilities, a springboard for the viewers’ imagination.
It is also autobiographical, in the sense that the work is a conduit, a way to understand and comment on a confusion of stimuli. By this, I don’t mean it is in any way therapeutic, but symbolic of life experiences, a kind of visionary diary, coming about through necessity and a gut response to the world around me.
I enjoy stories, particularly epic, symbolic dramas that humble us and communicate a sense of awe. There are often outsider-survivors in my prints that remind me of situations and maligned characters in Cormac McCarthy’s novels, standing on a threshold of decision or flight.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Some favourites that I return to are El Greco, Soutine, and Kubin for the sheer pleasure of looking, to stand in their shoes and be awed (as opposed to pilfering).
The old master printmakers fill me with wonder, both for their vision (when witches and angels had lived potential) and mind-boggling technical skill, be it in the prints of Bellange, Durer, or Hans Baldung Grien.
Then there’s Goya, Hogarth, and Arthur Boyd.
I often spend time with work that isn’t like my own, for example, I find solace in Winifred Nicholson’s quietly intense paintings, but also enjoy a bucket of cold water thrown in my face by Paul McCarthy who tests personal limits of good and bad taste, what the Chapman Brothers call ‘beauty in disgust’.
I enjoy looking at contemporary artists on Instagram for the sheer expressive variety. One particular favourite who I’ve exchanged work with is Kathleen Cottell whose thoughtful monoprints express a side not often seen in my work of tender, warm relationship between people and animals, within collective mythology.
What or who inspires your art?
Nature, current events, a sense of ousting niggles that might be hard to grasp, and a moral compass.
Our greyhound draws me in – aesthetically to his elongated form and elegance, and to his inner peace. Closeness to such a present spirit is always a lesson, even if I’m miles away from such contentment. I benefit working from him, looking closely and trying to fix that looking, a form of reverence that stills time. I like the simplicity of these pieces, once all the chaos has been stripped away and there is a curled nugget of dog essence or a dream image drifting.
And art history. Without it, I would be nothing. I take my direction and clues from the past and continue that graphic tradition, especially in printmaking that still has much to say. I’m aware that technically my work is that of a Luddite, but psychologically I think it expresses experiences of life lived here and now despite lacking signs of contemporaneity; it’s a mythical vision – no clothes, cars, rarely an interior space, nor pandering to photography.
Are there any recurring themes within your work and can you tell us about them?
As a young man, I led an unsettled, itinerant life, working as a labourer, farmer, and factory worker in England and Wales before moving to Antigua. I lived there for a year, attempting self-sufficiency for a few months until broke, hungry and wanting fresh adventure, I took work as the sole crew member on a small yacht. With the misanthropic captain, we sailed across the Atlantic through two storms where we lost a sail and provisions, arriving in Spain three months later. More misadventures followed but my reason for mentioning these vain-glorious trials is that mythologising the hardships that nature, other people or our own mental vagaries throw at us, recurs in different guises throughout my work.
This autobiographical aspect, though not used deliberately, is often played out as a solitary figure or animal in a barren landscape, mid-adventure, vulnerable to abuses of power, battling against the elements and their own trails of faith. The animals in my work also act as go-betweens for our subconscious, like shamanic messengers.
Such themes naturally impinge on a simple desire for accuracy. For example ‘Running Crow’ which looks like an invention, came about by simply making an etching of a crow that had been strung upside down by a gamekeeper and stiffened when uprighted into that striding guise. The work is symbolic and mythical rather than fantastical, the textural nature of its bony, craggy forms (which the drypoint technique renders so well), giving a sense of rugged occurrence. Perhaps there’s a depressive aspect to these visions but even then, nothing lies down passively, there is usually a vitality, fierce energy.
My art frequently combines concerns about what is happening on the world stage, our potential to bring about environmental and humanitarian destruction, with spiritual awareness.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
I work from a garden studio near the house, painted turquoise with a yellow swing outside. It’s small, well organised by necessity, with a printing press, plan chest, lines from the rafters to hang fresh prints, a surrounding shelf above head height, and a drawing board that doubles up as a study wall. For close work, I sit at a fold-down desk overlooking the porch (where the dog sleeps) and garden with all the comings and goings of birdlife.
Do you have any studio rituals?
I tend to leave the studio shipshape with brushes or printmaking equipment laid out ready for the next day’s work with something unfinished to carry me through. This allows the subconscious to work overnight and means I’m not rendered inert by options when I return in a different mental state.
I like to be up early to walk our dog knowing there’s a day’s potential ahead. I put the coffee on before a meditation which is 2 minutes giving thanks and 10 minutes silence. It’s a good start and stills a tendency to anxiety and over-excitement. I always have music on, usually the symphonies and operas that get on my wife’s nerves, but after a while, I don’t hear it. It seems almost disrespectful to the music but does coax me into a different mindset.
What are you working on currently?
Unusually there’s a poem that I’ve been trying to write about a toad and man meeting at the edge of a pond. The man slowly walks into the water and embracing the toad becomes submerged until a film of duckweed closes over his head. The two beings forge into a chrysalis and by degrees awake from a metamorphosis into a consolidated being. There’s an awkward eroticism to the poem but fundamentally it’s about our primeval connection with the natural world and reinstating that symbiotic relationship, ridding ourselves of any sense of hierarchy!
The little pond where I picture the narrative taking place is 15 feet from the studio so is always wallowing in my subconscious. I’m exploring this idea in a series of monoprints in the hope of understanding something that is missing with the words. This may sound like artistic suicide but is tempered by ongoing studies of horses and greyhounds.
Where can we buy your art?
Through my website, Instagram or The Biscuit Factory Gallery, Newcastle.
What are your ambitions?
I recently completed a commission to design labels for The Prisoner Wine Company in California. My remit was to show Goya’s ‘Little Prisoner’ etching from their iconic Red Blend bottle in different states of hope and despair. It was refreshing to be reined in by the brief and I felt proud to see my work featured on the three new bottles.
It would be a pleasure to illustrate a novel like Susana Clarke’s Piranesi and find outlets for work to feature on T-shirts and CDs. I think there is something direct yet visionary about my etchings that would suit these mediums. Any advice would be most welcome.
I also like to think ahead to exhibitions that have an aspect of site-specificity, for example, a two-year residency at Cliffe Castle Museum in Yorkshire resulted in a large show featuring prints and drawings that made narrative connections between statues and exhibits in the natural history rooms.
I would love to find representation in London, perhaps a less conservative milieu would allow fresh directions as yet unexplored. Also, it’s a no-brainer, but who wouldn’t want to be included in the next Flux magazine!
For more information and to view more of Mike Moor’s work visit: www.mikemoor.com and Instagram @mikemoorartist
You can also view Mike Moor’s work in The FLUX Review Virtual Exhibition
