We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tony Moore a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tony, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
As a child — like many children — I always used to paint and draw. While my father was a lawyer and mother a homemaker (it was a full-time job in those days) and also an amateur artist, I didn’t seriously think of becoming an artist until my mother tragically died when I was 16 years old and I went on to Grammar School. This is back in the UK in 1965. There, I connected with the art teacher and spent many concentrated hours in the art room, drawing, painting and making pottery. In my world very little else made sense to me until graduation when he recommended that I go to Art School. Being an artist gave me an identity and a foundation for never looking back. Only for moving forward — whatever direction that might take — into the unknown, which continues in the studio to this day. It’s an adventure. A way of life.
Tony, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I wish this was a verbal answer, because I could speak on the subjects for hours, but to write it all out for publication is another thing. Here goes and we’ll see where it ends up.
Let me start with a brief bio and artist statement:
I’m now 76 years old, an English-American sculptor and painter represented in international museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Greenville Museum, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Art Museum of the U. of Memphis and ASU Art Museum, US and the Yorkshire Museum and Derby Museum, UK.
Back in 1971, I left the UK for the US on a Foreign Student Fellowship to Yale University where in 1973 I gained an MFA in Sculpture. Subsequently, I received prestigious awards, including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, CAPS Grant and Sally and Milton Avery Fellowship.
In 1998, after 25 years of making sculptures and paintings in New York City, I relocated my home and studio to the scenic Hudson River Valley near Cold Spring, NY (50 miles north of NYC) where on a mountain top property I built a spacious studio, gallery and Japanese style Anagama-Noborigama wood-fire kiln. My unique ceramic sculptures are fired in the kiln four times a year in weeklong communal events.
My creative work is concerned with the relationship of humanity and nature. I believe in an expanded concept of “Nature” which embodies all existence, both the seen and unseen, socio-political events, daily occurrences, as well as private intuitions that are made concrete through creative action. My objects are places of remembrance where multiplicities of associations take place. Most recently these have been concerned with issues of the human condition.
Within the context of current issues such as migration, global pandemic and now the Russian-Ukraine and Gaza war, these abstracted works evoke both contemporary anxieties and aspirations toward the future.
That’s it in a nutshell, but let me extrapolate upon some of these things:
Like many creatives in the arts, the journey has been long and hard, filled with trials and tribulations, yet also excitement, a sense of adventure and fulfillment. We are always at the edge of the unknown as we endeavor to explore new territory and make new discoveries in our work and potentially to know and realize ourselves more fully. The greatest satisfaction comes in the studio when we are the first to witness something from our hands, hearts and minds (and souls) which we have never seen before. This is why I do it. This is why we do it. This is the creative spirit which runs throughout humanity, and might I say, throughout existence itself.
Having made sculpture and painting for 30 years — primarily painting in NYC in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s — then reconnecting with the experience of using clay and particularly the wood-fire kiln, my wife-to-be and I moved in 1998 to a wooded mountain-top property outside Cold Spring, NY, in the Hudson Valley where I built my own Anagama-Noborigama Japanese-style kiln. This enabled a whole new area of exploration and in due course the building of a large and extended community of ceramic artists who gathered at the kiln. Now operating for over 25 years, I have 400 participants on my mailing list where folks come from miles around, the NYC environs, and as far away as Toronto.
While I have gained recognition, I have always been a “working artist” in the sense that I have always been seriously committed to my art-making and — like many others — have earned a living along the way to support it. Creatives do any number of jobs to support their art. When I was an undergraduate at Cardiff College of Art, Wales, I worked part-time for the Welsh Arts Council, installing several exhibitions. Then, after graduation from Yale and moving to NYC, I was employed by the Guggenheim Museum for 16 years, where, amongst other things, I installed exhibitions and also worked as a currier of exhibitions to Moscow, Italy, Spain and domestically within the US. This not only paid my rent, but allowed access to other seriously minded artists, some famous, the professional “art world”, directors, curators and collectors. Though frustrating, in the sense that I wasn’t in my studio as much as I might have liked, it was a tremendous experience of being grounded in the professional visual arts at a major international institution. In retrospect, I was most fortunate. It was not just a question of access to people, ways of doing things, but the ability to experience, examine and discuss high art and masterpieces every single day — often in acute detail. It was a job, but also continuing education, as is life itself. As a former spiritual practitioner, I also regard life to be a “walking meditation” of “mindfulness”. To the lay-person, perhaps awareness, or consciousness.
Isn’t this what living’s about?
So, after my NYC experience of working in museums, teaching, free-lancing in the visual arts, and after moving to the country, I periodically continued these practices and also operated my kiln as a creative fee-based business. One thing is for sure, and that is, one cannot fire a large wood-fire kiln on one’s own. It takes both a community of participants to help fill the kiln with their own ceramic works and to assist in loading, stoking, unloading, maintaining and replenishing the multiple stacks of firewood which are required for each and every firing. It is very much a communal team effort where I am the owner, leader, organizer, director, educator, primary artist and team coach. Yes, it takes a village.
I welcome all participants who would like to experience wood-firing, whether professional, semi-professional, hobbyists, or complete novices. We all have to start somewhere, no matter one’s age.
Those who have little personal knowledge of the arts and artists have sometimes asked if I’m going to retire. There is no such thing, or any desire to stop “doing the work” because creativity and discovery leads us forward, until we run out of time. We are fortunate to have had the opportunity.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I was born in 1948, just after the Second World War. During the war my father had been in service with the UK’s Royal Signals in North Africa where he was captured, spending the next 3 ½ years of his life as a prisoner of war. In due course he was marched and transported from North Africa, through Italy — periodically escaping — and eventually imprisoned in a camp outside Dresden where he labored building a German Autobahn. Like many of his generation, these traumas deeply affected their lives and families.
While I lived in NYC I sought-out the largest and least expensive art studios where I could possibly live and work. In those days, it was mainly illegal commercial downtown lofts which one would often have to renovate. In 1974, one year after graduating from Yale, I found a studio in NOHO (North of Houston Street) above Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer who subsequently became famous and later died of Aids. In order to move in, instead of “key-money”, I had to install an oak floor. I enjoyed the studio and did a lot of satisfying work there, but then, after four years, the owner wanted to sell, so I had to move out.
After a long search, I finally found a 3,500 sq. ft., empty top 6th floor walk-up loft, located in Downtown Brooklyn. It was totally raw — windows broken, pigeons flying around, rain dripping through the roof, no heat, plumbing or utilities, but it was really, really large and cheap. Needing total renovation, I labored on it for the next year or more, into late evenings, weekends and vacations, while doing a 40 hr. a week job at the Guggenheim and also going heavily into debt. At first, I made a deal with the landlord not to pay any rent while I fixed up his property. However, this was the deal, and in the end, it was a magnificent space, resembling a 1970’s SOHO gallery (South of Houston Street) where I worked for the next five years. Then, on a Saturday night in February 1983 — while painting in the studio — I smelled smoke, but didn’t pay much attention because by then jazz musicians had been moved into the third floor where they often burned scrap wood in their potbelly stove. (No heat provided in this building.) When I saw thick black smoke pouring from between the floorboards and billowing up the empty elevator shaft, I knew the building was on fire.
At that moment, one might think, “What’s important — what should I take?”. My voice said, “Get the fuck out of here. Take yourself!”. Running down the stairs, beating on doors, raising the alarm, I screamed, “The building’s on fire!”. Fortunately, there were only two other people. Then, in my paint-spattered sneakers, T-shirt and painter’s pants, I stood in the cold (there had been a blizzard the week before) watching as the building went up in flames — and along with it, thirteen years of my art.
While left with practically nothing – except, thankfully employment — friends began to rally in moral and financial support, taking me in, helping to salvage whatever sodden, smoke impregnated artworks and personal effects we could. With a two-person exhibition scheduled several months ahead with Ross Bleckner (a well-known artist), I worked to carry on.
Amongst the devastation, which took a further year and a half to physically recover from — renovating another home and studio all over again (where I remained for a further fourteen years) — I realized that all the negatives where in fact a positive, re-confirming my essential belief in the inherent goodness of people; even that of total strangers. A valuable lesson.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
This is a big, big question that I’m not sure I can comprehensively answer without asking another question which is, what is the purpose of art? And that’s a question while fully knowing that 99% of creatives hardly ever make any money, support themselves from their art, or gain significant appreciation for what they do. Yes, there are a few millionaires and billionaires amongst us, but as in any other field, very few.
Historically, art and culture has served many different purposes, from the manifestation of power, to ritualistic spiritual practices, to everything in between. I think the first thing to recognize is that humans are creative animals, as are many other species, but that with human consciousness, we can be self-reflective and do it for and with purpose — with awareness.
We now exist within a global community where there is an even more rapid communication and exchange of information, technology and ideas. However, even with greater homogeneity between peoples, there are still (thankfully) real differences between world societies and for them deep, underlying significance of varying cultural practices. When the question is asked, “What can society do?”, I am assuming that society to be America!
While I wish there was a unifying cultural purpose, within the complex society where we live, there really isn’t one, only multi-various, and at many different levels from “high art”, the “acclaimed”, to the “street”, “popularism”, or the “unknown”, or “uncared for”. There is stratification of so-called “significance” throughout society, and might I add, whether we like it or not, there always will be. What we might therefore seek is to give meaning to the purposefully creative action or activity by integrating various disparate voices and participants into the whole matrix of our culture. To varying degrees, I do believe this is already being done by enlightened cultural and educational institutions throughout the country. People need to be heard, to be recognized, to be valued and received. There are so many stories to be told and in so many divergent forms. Above all, beyond the decorative or entertaining purposes, I believe the arts should ultimately hold a mirror to who we are, both individually, collectively as a social group, to our humanity and evoke and reflect higher purposes of who we might be, and who we might become. While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not an artist/creative within the common use of the term, there is no doubt to me that he lived a creatively purposeful life that with others transformed society. Creativity, aspiration and purpose can take many forms.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tonymooreart.com, www.tonymoorekiln.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/tonymooreart/
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tony.moore.77770194/
Image Credits
1-7 Al Nowak/On Location , 8-9 Robert Brush, 10 Jordan Becker