Nancy Whittaker, Tarrangower Times
Don’t miss visiting the David Moore exhibition at the Cascade Art Gallery in Fountain Street, from now until 13 November. The exhibition is open from 10am – 5pm, on Thursday to Sunday each week.
Red dots abound as the works are so popular and covetable. This is his second solo exhibition at Cascade. The first mainly featured exquisitely rendered still-life objects.
David Moore is a delightful interview subject, erudite and somewhat self-effacing, given his long and dedicated artistic career, which started with a teacher training course at Hawthorn Tech (now Swinburne).
This was after a somewhat alarming experience at Doveton Tech as an untrained teacher. As luck would have it, thanks to an introduction by a friend, he moved on to teach at Yarra Valley Grammar for several years, as well as winning an Embling Foundation Award.
David has been painting since he was 11 years old. As a child, he would sit alongside his father’s easel at their home in Croydon and be instructed in the painting techniques of tonal realism. David is also a generous painting teacher and a man of stories.
Many of these stories feature his father, Graham Moore, also an accomplished painter (nine times exhibitor in the Archibald portrait prize during the 1950s) and David loves to share his memories of growing up under his father’s ever-watchful eye.
David taught tonal painting for 30 years at Montsalvat, the Justus Jorgensen (1893–1975) architecturally inspired treasure in Eltham on the outskirts of Melbourne.
In 1970, David was awarded a significant prize, the Alice M. E. Bale scholarship, which afforded him a studio and the use of a house, with a few bills paid. He was assigned two painting mentors, Sir William Dargie CBE and Harley Griffiths.
The latter, his preferred mentor, was chief restorer at the National Gallery of Victoria. He took David behind the scenes to see The Banquet of Cleopatra, the enormous eighteenth-century Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painting as it was being restored. For David, it was an exciting glimpse of art history being made and preserved.
When David moved on to teach at Montsalvat he was in the Alistair Knox house, which was a mud brick place with dirt floors. He improved it and added an Edna Walling garden while teaching there.
About eight years ago David bought a little miner’s cottage in Chewton, where he did a lot of small artworks, mainly still-life. More recently, he moved to a larger property on an acre in Castlemaine.
He said that his formal background training has loosened up over the years, with shape, tone, texture and colour more integrated and painterly. His use of colour is very attuned to the local landscape in all seasons, softly muted, with some skilful use of brushstrokes to add texture and tone.
David’s landscapes are from around Castlemaine, Harcourt and surrounding areas Elphinstone, Maldon, Sutton Grange and Baringhup.
Cascade Art Gallery Director Kareen Anchen has written: ‘He depicts the landscape of the Central Goldfields as flat, rocky, vast, ravaged, distant, age-old, moody, picturesque, romantic, evocative, breathtaking, and then there are the David Moore skies. Pluming, billowing, puffy white on light clouds of strange dimensions and the colours are sympatico with the landscape – golden mauve sunset or tangerine-pink sunrise, clear crisp light, tonal silver-blue greys in the shadows and mysterious layered darks’.
Dr. Rosalind Hollinrake who is an esteemed Art Curator and Historian, officially opened the current David Moore exhibition on Saturday 2 October.
She said that, “A wine takes on the flavour of the landscape soil in which the grape is grown and so too do David’s pictures. They catch the feel of the terrain, the airy atmospheric temperature, the dry yellow grasses that heighten the dark tones of trees. His compositional skill is ever evident. Whether it’s the swooping arabesque of a hillside, effortlessly balanced by a billowing cumulus cloud formation, or a vast stretch of land with a dusty road stretching or snaking into the unknown distance and big sky overhead, we can taste and smell and drink these landscapes with our eyes and they ring vividly true. We are not aware of paint or a canvas – we are there with the painter and seeing them in a new way through his eyes.”
Don’t miss the free floor talks with David Moore 2pm Sunday 23 October and then again for closing drinks 2pm Sunday 13 November at the Gallery surrounded by his wonderful paintings. No bookings required.
For further information check out: Cascade Art, 1A Fountain St Maldon, www.cascadeart.com.au 0408 844 152.
See all the pictures in the issue.
This article appeared in the Tarrangower Times, 14 October 2022.
