About Me

Nick Moore is an abstract painter, writer, curator and improvising musician based in Bristol.
He has been a practicing artist and educator for twenty years and is an experienced lecturer in both Art and Art History, working on both graduate and post graduate levels. He has many years experience of running painting and drawing workshops in Museums, Galleries and Community spaces, as well as studio-based sessions.

He has previously worked as a performer in street theatre, circus and fringe theatre; as a stonemason and architectural carver; a sculptor and registered art therapist.

Research

There are two strands to my current research, both of which inform and underpin my painting practice;

Exploring Black

Research about Black as a colour and how its use in painting has resonances with wider culture such as science, religion and psychology.

As Matisse said, ‘Black is a force’. I have been immersed in a focused enquiry into black as a colour since 2007, initially through a series of paintings called Dark Intervals, followed by the recent DarkLight series, alongside a body of writing. I realised recently that this focus stemmed from a series of day long painting and drawing workshops that I held in my studio between 2006 and 2008, called Exploring Black. These were workshops using only black materials such as graphite, charcoal, black ink and black acrylic, and exploring the infinite subtlety of density that could be achieved through different mark making techniques. Led by my work as an art therapist, I initially set out to challenge the received wisdom in psychiatry that black in images by patients was indicative of depression and death. 

Further inquiry into painters who used black as a major component in their work, particularly Goya, Matisse, Miro, Soulages, Motherwell, Kline, Rothko, Reinhardt, Stella and recently McKeever, led me to revisit the question of the energy of black, especially the stereotypical ‘depressive’ reactions to Rothko’s late black paintings recently shown at Tate Modern.

This encouraged me to look at wider cultural aspects of the meanings of black in religions, science and music as well as art history. The resulting working text, a prose poem, is called ‘Hymn To Black’ and is a collage of selected pieces from the research writing including quotes from artists such as Kandinsky, Matisse and Soulages, Alchemical text, a prayer to Kali, and excerpt from the Song of Songs, and writers such as Lorca and Aristotle, also original poems on aspects of black.

It is now a substantial size and still growing. It was part of a ‘work-in-progress’ performance at Arnolfini, Bristol as part of the 2010 Bristol Poetry Festival with a collective of improvising musicians I lead called the In-congruity Project (formed in 1993 with fellow painter and musician John Eaves) 

Abstraction, Chaos and the Creative Process

Research into the relationship of abstraction, chaos and the creative process.

This encompasses a study of Creation Myths from around the world, with their fundamental ideas of beginnings; the idea of Chaos, defined as ‘disorder or shapeless mass’ but from the Greek meaning “the primal emptiness, space”; alongside this I am  also looking at theories of the creative process and then the resonance of all these themes to abstraction – ‘that which represents the essence’. Abstraction works with chaos in that it either structures it through geometry (eg geometric abstraction of Mondrian) or allows it in the informal or gestural (eg abstract expressionism of Kandinsky). These are themes that I have explored in workshops and in the context of lectures and seminars in Further Education and Lifelong Learning.

Lectures, Seminars and papers given

2014 Aug          Material/Gesture artist talk, Sidcot Gallery, Nr Bristol

2014 Feb          DarkLight artist talk, Allsop Gallery, Bridport Arts Centre

2012 June        DarkLight artist talk, APT Gallery, London

2010 June        Dark Intervals artist talk at Imagine Studios, Stroud

2010 Feb         Dark Intervals artist talk, Brewhouse Art Centre, Taunton

2008 Nov        The Real Surrealists dayschool, Bristol University.

2008 Feb         Abstraction, Chaos & Creative Process, dayschool, Bristol University.

2007 Mar         The Ordinary Madness of the Artist paper, ISPS Conference, Bath University

2006 Sept        The Sound of Colour dayschool, Bristol University.

2005 Dec         Starting at Zero gallery talk, Arnolfini, Bristol.

2005 Sept        Chymical Garden gallery talk, Quay Arts, Isle of Wight.

2005 June        Outsider Art - Historical Perspectives dayschool, Oxford University.

2004 Oct         Degenerate Art & the Avant Garde dayschool, Bristol University.

2003 Nov        Outsider Art? dayschool, Bristol University.

2002 Nov         An Art History of Madness public evening lecture, Crawford College of Art & Design,Cork.

2002 Oct         The Ordinary Madness of Art  Brewhouse Art Centre, Taunton, one day conference;
                       project coordinator & presented the title paper. Collaboration between Studio Upstairs and 
                       Pavillion Publishing.

2001 Nov        Outsider Art dayschool, Bath University.

2000 Nov        The End of Outsider Art EdinburghUniversity, three day international conference; 
                       presented a  paper ‘Outsider Art or Insider Trading’.