Telling stories that tell stories: The art of Brian Moore

In an interview with David Sylvester around 1970, the Irish painter Francis Bacon quipped: "You can be optimistic and totally without hope." He was always amazed when he got out of bed in the morning, he said, yet he pursued his work with an almost belligerent perseverance, short-circuiting his own mastery of design by warping and mutiliating his subjects on canvas. By way of an explanation, he said he wanted to pull images straight off his nervous system, wanted, really, to bypass all the interference of judgment and meaning and get right down to the guts and gore of his art.

No matter. Artworks as brutal and pungent as Bacon's don't need the explications of their maker. They tell their story without him — or they at least relate the absence of any tale.

This morning, I came upon a houseful of artworks that stood just as resolutely on their own two feet. They spoke quite well without voice. Nonetheless, I found myself as fascinated by the narratives that spawned the paintings as I was by the paintings themselves. So it went today with the artist and musician Brian Moore.

This is Brian's latest painting. He's not done it with it yet. It's titled Jungle, and you may be able to guess why. Brian's a Rochester native who now lives in Batavia. He has toured the country in an indie-rock band, studied fine art at college, founded his own recording studio — Red Booth Recording in Medina — produced his own albums, worked for a Web site about horses, painted, sculpted and just generally got by, though he hasn't yet reached his goal of settling down and brewing up a family life. For someone who considers painting a secondary activity, he's damned good at it. Real damned good.

"I worked so hard at doing the music," he says, painting "became a sort of release... something I didn't have to take so seriously."

Unlike Francis Bacon, Brian gets at the guts and gore of his painting through hashing out (sometimes for a long time in advance) a narrative that takes shape in his mind before it all comes spilling out. At one point today, he called it mental throwup. His paintings couldn't be more filled with meaning before they hit the canvas.

"An idea starts subconscious, almost as if there's a movie or a storyline," he says. "Then I find one image that represents it."

Let's leave any interpretations of Jungle up to you for now. Instead, let's take an earlier work of his, called Cancer. (This is a section of that piece to the left here.) Brian composed it out of spray insulation, a goopy, intestinal looking stuff that he then painted once it dried.

Cancer most literally means what it says and came out of Brian's own grieving over his friend's death from an agressive melanoma some years back. By giving form to that pain and loss, Brian found at least a little release.

Not that all of his art comes out of the tragedy of living. Another work made of the spray insulation was a commissioned piece that was a straightforward task of re-interpretation.

Folks from the George Eastman House in Rochester asked Brian to build them a replica of Treebeard, a character from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in honor of that year's Oscar celebration. Brian told me the story of constructing the mammoth sculpture in his parent's garage that winter, and how he installed a sound system in the creature's chest that continuously played the white noise of flowing water, sometimes interrupted by the  booming voice of the character speaking lines from the film. He laughed as he remembered the spooked reactions of people at the Oscar party when they heard this lumpy bearded thing suddenly barking at them.

Brian spoke a lot about his music, which should rightly be noted as his number one passion — though he said that he feels the same sort of energy whether he's painting, writing lyrics, singing or recording someone else's music. That would make sense. It was his music, not his painting, that took him across country twice. His music settled him in Ocean City, Maryland for a summer. His music brought him through rural Kentucky and into the heart of New York City. Maybe most importantly, these days, music pays the bills, and that means he gets to live the life he chooses.

Brian's current band Live for the Day will be headlining the Battle of the Bands show at Water Street Music Hall in Rochester this Friday night.

But let us get back to the paintings, for a moment, before I go cook dinner. Of all the great works Brian introduced me to this morning, I may have to say Frogman appealed to me the most, maybe because there is a little frogman in me, though I won't admit it to often.

You may not be able to see it, but this piece is not only made of paint on the canvas. Brian has mounted a table, draped with a gold velvet tablecloth, onto the painting. Atop the table are a pair of wine glasses — one full, one empty — and two place settings, for dinner. The empty glass tells us that frogman has already finished his wine, and that tells us he has likely been sitting there for a while.

After Brian told me the story that became this painting and the story the painting now tells, whether we see it or not, I fell in love with it even more. It sounded like a tale J.D. Salinger might have concoted if he let his humans become a little more... I don't know... animal. (Or maybe more like the Argentinian surrealist Julio Cortazar.) It goes like this: Our hero here, if we may call him that, is a gentleman who was born with the head of a frog. It's no mask. It's him. His wealthy aristocratic parents kept him forever locked up in the house to keep his freakishness from the world. But evenually, frogman makes it outside. He puts on a disguise and ventures out, meets a woman, falls in love. He invites her back to his place. Only, she never shows up. And that is where we find him, sitting, waiting, drinking his wine and contemplating his isolation (which is as if he were stranded in a hut on the top of a mountain). Beautiful.

Check back with us for a future video discussion about Brian's piece Jungle and (possibly) the premiere of Live for the Day's music video now in production.