Artist :
George Moore’s art explores the ambiguous and the indefinite: meaning is always unstable and there is never a final answer – it always has ‘a certain uncertainty’. He avoids discussing even his own personal perspective as to the meaning of particular works, leaving it to the viewer to decide for themselves. This can make interpretation difficult. Nonetheless, with slow acquaintance certain themes emerge from the works themselves: beauty masking cruelty; seriousness subverted by ridiculousness; and the act of looking itself. In his paintings, pastel works and drawings, shifting figures are half-glimpsed within abstraction, victims and voyeurs, a play in which we ourselves are complicit. These themes are reinforced by George’s pictorial methods, including the combination of ambiguous overlapping spatial plains, the ‘endless brushstroke’, and exploitation of the natural visual ambiguities inherent in the materials themselves, whether acrylic paint, pastel pigment or charcoal.
Background
George Moore was born in 1916 in Yorkshire, England. In 1920 he moved with his mother to New Zealand. Since 1950 he as lived and worked in Australia. He has exhibited widely in Australia and his work is represented in various international collections. Although he has lived in Australia most of his long life, he still considers himself English out of respect for his father, who died in the First World War. The landscapes and characters which appear in his work however, have a quintessentially Australian or New Zealand character.
