John Moore, Six O'Clock in Mill Town, 2014, oil on canvas, 42 x 50"
John Moore, Six O’Clock in Mill Town, 2014, oil on canvas, 42 x 50″

John Moore: Resonance, the first solo exhibition in a Maine museum of artist John Moore’s work will open at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland on Saturday, March 3. A public reception honoring the artist will be held on Saturday, March 17, from 4 to 6pm. The exhibition will remain on view at CMCA through Sunday, June 17.

John Moore: Resonance presents a ten-year survey of the artist’s work completed primarily in his Belfast, Maine, studio, where he has lived for more than a decade, first seasonally and more recently full-time, since retiring from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Chair of the Department of Fine Arts from 1999 to 2009. A highly esteemed teacher and painter, with more than forty-two solo exhibitions to his credit, Moore is widely admired for his evocative, beautifully rendered composite images that range in subject from a mill town in eastern Pennsylvania and a manufacturing site in Philadelphia, to urbanized locations from Bangor to Belfast in midcoast Maine.

John Moore, Distant Voices, 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 50"
John Moore, Distant Voices, 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 50″

Moore’s Midwest origins, he was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1941, and the remembered working class culture of his upbringing affect the choices that inspire his paintings and drawings, which are marked by personal experience and the “weathered weight of time.” Composed in the studio from drawings, on-site visits, sketchbook notations, photographs, and other source material, Moore’s paintings distill images from several locations into one, and are put together in a way that is intended to appear seamless. Some of them are close to the appearance of a specific site, some depart considerably. Everything in them is real however, or as he says, “should have been real, or could be real. That’s the only rule: it could be real.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 64-page catalog with an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, the former director of the Farnsworth Art Museum and founding curator of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In the essay, Crosman writes, “Moore’s montage sensibility takes painting back to its post-medieval roots and then slowly, smoothly, smartly, almost imperceptibly, imposes a contemporary pictorial logic of being in an unfixed present while simultaneously existing in several places, times, moods, or even styles, all at once. Only painting can do that. And Moore…quietly, clearly, inexorably makes us aware of this simple fact.”

Also included in the exhibition catalog is the poem, Frankford Station, written by poet Vincent Katz in response to Moore’s painting by the same name.

For additional information about the exhibition, John Moore: Resonance, please visit cmcanow.org or call 207-701-5005.