Show Preview | Robert Moore

Robert Moore, Wind River Mountains, oil, 30 x 40.

Manitou Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
July 7-17

Summer may have just arrived, but Manitou Galleries will be ablaze with autumn colors—plus a touch of winter snow—thanks to Nature’s Testimony, the first show for award-winning landscape painter Robert Moore at the Santa Fe, New Mexico, gallery. “His work is a testimony to the art that’s around us in nature every single day,” says Cyndi Hall, Manitou’s associate director, explaining the appeal of the more than one dozen canvases Moore has been diligently and joyfully preparing. The Idaho-based artist will be present on Friday, July 7, from 5 to 7 p.m., to greet guests at the opening, which will feature live music, beverages and hors d’oeuvres. The show will remain on view through July 17.

Moore’s style has sometimes been categorized as impressionist; indeed, like the works of the 19th-century French painters who embodied that movement, his scenes capture impressions of light in the natural world through his visible paint application and interplay of colors. The artist himself, however, eschews that label. He developed his own process—using caulking tubes to apply primary colors to a canvas, then combining and spreading them in energetic marks using palette knives and brushes—to achieve profound visual harmonies for the viewer that, although able to logically understand and emotionally grasp, he himself cannot physically see.

“I’m colorblind,” he says of his rare inability to distinguish greens and reds from the blues and yellows that he can discern. “It was the catalyst that forced me to paint differently from other artists.” In color theory classes during his graduate studies at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, he diligently “learned what makes natural colors,” which is knowledge he applies “to celebrate their richness and movement, making them even more important.”

By way of example, Moore offers THE RIGHT PLACE, depicting an aspen grove at the height of fall. “Everybody sees the intense yellows in those aspen leaves,” he says, noting that the other colors he deliberately chose to add throughout the canvas—including reds and violets, along with subtler grays, tans, and even blues and greens—serve to heighten the impact of the familiar autumnal hues. “I’m trying to understand the complexities of the colors underneath [those that people consciously see].” Through that process, he enriches the impact his paintings have on others.

Robert Moore, Fresh Snow, oil, 30 x 40.

“Robert is a passionately spiritual human being,” Hall says, “and through color and texture his work is able to convey the feeling that we would get were we actually standing in that environment.” Her own favorite work in this show, a painting titled ON THE RIDGE, places the viewer in a steep field covered in tawny scrub, giving way to evergreens and, beyond, craggy snow-clad mountains peaks. “Yet, he almost never uses white for the snow except where the sun is hitting the top of the peaks,” Hall adds, marveling at the bold strokes of dusty rose, plum and other hues that suggest the sunset’s glow on the high slopes. “He’s a master at his craft. After many years of painting, he has honed in on how to create the testimony that nature itself would want to give.” —Norman Kolpas

contact information
(505) 986-0440
www.manitougalleries.com

This story appeared in the June/July 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.