The artist’s way

“You start off, you get stuck on something, you go work on something else and then try to clear your mind out of that. You get stuck again, and then you go back to the thing you were blocked with in the first place. All of a sudden, things opens up.”

Things have been opening up for decades now for Moore, an acclaimed contemporary painter and academic known for painting industrial scenes, urban architecture and abstract landscapes with gritty realism. His work is shown in museums from San Francisco to Chicago to New York to Maine – among others.

Moore paints with such precision that the artwork looks like a photograph, but his works often present a collage of images, as if the viewer is looking at a scene with one set of eyes yet different points of view. As poet John Yau wrote in John Moore: Portals, a 2024 monograph about the artist, Moore’s works evoke “a threshold moment when the daily world, and everything in it, suddenly holds our attention, and we look at it as if we are seeing it for the first time.”

WashU Magazine photographed Moore there last spring, at work in the spacious, north-facing studio adjacent to his home on the Passagassawakeag River. But he’s speaking now from his new northern California studio, where he and Sandra relocated over the summer to be closer to family.

The new studio is bigger, but he admits it isn’t quite the same. “It doesn’t have the perfect lighting,” he says, “but it has great potential. We’ll manage.”

Moore grew up in Wellston, Missouri, the son of a mailman and a secretary, in a working-class inner suburb of St. Louis that was more urban-industrial than white-picket fence. The manufacturing grittiness Moore saw everyday would inform his work years later. But as a boy, he just wanted to create.

“I always wanted to be an artist,” he says, “but I had no clue on how to go about doing it.” He took mechanical drawing, the only class that remotely resembled “art” offered at his all-boys parochial high school, and he went on to earn a certificate at a St. Louis-area trade school called Ranken Technical College. His first job was at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation as a draftsman and technical illustrator drawing airplane parts.

But that childhood dream lingered, and within two years he began taking night classes at WashU in what was then known as University College. As Moore tells it, it was a single instructor in a drawing class, Mildred Bailey Carpenter, who was the catalyst for his artistic career. Carpenter told him he belonged as a full-time student in the School of Fine Arts and helped him put together a portfolio to go along with his application. 

“Getting the acceptance letter from Washington University was one of the great days of my life,” he says. “Nobody in my family had ever been to college; it was a very big deal.” Tuition was $1,400 a year, he says, and he was awarded a $500 scholarship. “I lived at home so I could make it work,” he recalls. “When I walked onto that campus, I thought I was in heaven.”

In Bixby Hall, Moore studied under Ed Boccia, Barry Schachtman, Arthur Osver and Fred Conway. “I studied at WashU at a glorious moment for the School of Fine Arts,” he says. “When I got to graduate school, I was more prepared in the fundamentals of visual art than many of my classmates who had come from other schools.”

As he began to hone his craft at WashU and learn the fundamentals of painting, he leaned as an undergraduate into what he called the “semi-abstract.” He recalls driving two hours north to Hannibal, Missouri, and sitting on the bluffs overlooking the town. He’d peer over the river into the expansive Illinois farmland and paint the landscape in “some sort of abstract manner,” he says. It wasn’t until he got to graduate school at Yale University — “Part two of the ‘big moments’ in my career,” he says — that he veered back to the “physical facts” of what was in front of his eyes and began painting in the style for which he has become known.

WashU opened the door to Yale and everything after, Moore says. During his junior year, he was one of two art students nominated for a summer residency at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk Connecticut, “the first time I had ever been out of Missouri.” The summer programs led to graduate school, and graduate school led to a lifetime of work that Moore is content to look back on — and add to.

At 85, the artist is still at work, always looking for new portals to take viewers through and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest of place — like his granddaughter’s softball game, which prompted him to finish a painting he began years ago in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, the setting for quite a few of his most famous works.

As Moore tells it: “One night there were these factory workers in Coatesville getting a softball game going after their shift. It was threatening rain, and they were rushing to get the game in. I thought, ‘I want to do a painting on this.”

He went back to his studio and began trying to capture the scene — an empty lot with an industrial urban background — but never finished. “For some 25 years, that painting has been in the back of my mind,” he says. “I could never get it to work.”

Now in his 80s, the artist is still it work, finding inspiration everywhere.

Until now. Something shifted for him while he was sitting at his granddaughter’s game this summer, and it’s one of the four paintings he’s working on in his new studio. “But the roots for that painting are in Coatesville,” he says.

And Moore’s roots are right here. “Washington University was a core experience,” he says. “I had great teachers who were also terrific people. They made an indelible impression on me that I’ve never forgotten.”