Brancaster Chronicle No. 38: Nick Moore Paintings
untitled – 2, 2016, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60″x48″.
10th July 2016, the artist’s studio, Bristol.
Those present: Hilde Skilton, Mark Skilton, John Bunker, Anne Smart, Anthony Smart, Nick Moore, Robin Greenwood, Sarah Greenwood, Emyr Williams.
untitled – 1, 2016, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60″x42″.
untitled – 3, 2016, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60″x48″.
untitled – 4, 2016, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 54″x54″.
Brancaster Chronicles 
Difficult to comment on the work without being there but remembering last year’s work where there was an intricacy and subtlety across the surface which Nick seems to have developed this year. Integrating ‘sculptural” elements with paint is an interesting way to generate space. Watching the film I wanted to get up close and see the surface, particularly the area of ‘cream’, what was that ‘doing’? Nick has a great sensitivity with the way he uses materials and I like the contrast of that with the overall impression of power in the work.
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Year on year, Nick’s work gets more interesting. His work has come from a place a few years back that was a little familiar in terms of its art-history lineage, and a bit stylised, and moved to somewhere new, verging on the very original. There is more can be done in this channel. The “backgrounds” to the work, which are more integrated in some of the work than others, I still think are at times a limiting factor to the more fluid and articulate passages. The drips and the partial orthogonal grids made by those drips (especially white on black) are a bit of a check on the spatiality, and the stiff, corrugated vertical space that Tony talks about in No.4 is something I don’t find conducive to going where the more interesting parts of the paintings seem to be suggesting they want to take me. This is hard to describe, but my incomplete suggestion towards the end of the film that the work was “sculptural” does, I still feel, have some validity. This is a very different use of the word “sculptural” to that in John P’s comment above, where he describes the collaged elements as such. Those seem to me to be on the whole successfully integrated, pictorially. What I’m trying to suggest is that the way Nick manipulates his content is some kind of hands-on “modelling” thing, almost “thumbing” the space around, as though the paint is already a three-dimensional medium (even when thin). It’s important to say that this is not suggestive of figurative shading and modelling of representational forms. Nick’s work seems to have the potential for something new, perhaps a more abstract kind of manipulation, simultaneously on the surface and within the picture-space.
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Robin, that’s really interesting when you talk about a ‘hands-on “modelling” thing, almost thumbing the space around’ as that is what I have literally been doing with clay over the last 18 months alongside the paintings…it was out of a frustration with the last paintings and wanting to get to grips with stuff in a more direct way….so maybe its paid off……
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Yes, well, of course I knew you had been using clay, and I’m sure there is a connection, but I did try to put that to one side in considering the feelings I got from the work – which are to do with the nature of the space you are creating, particularly in the more worked central passages, rather than your methodology. Again, they might well be linked, but not necessarily, and to push the thing further might mean that you don’t restrict yourself to one particular way of working. I think your work is at a critical juncture. You have achieved a lot already, and so you can afford to push the boat out in terms of really focussing on that very individual and original spatial content, and broadening it out, at the expense of all known conventional considerations.
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