Mick Moon, who has died aged 86, was the youngest of four associated and internationally respected British painters born in the 1930s and who rose to prominence from the 1960s: the three eldest, in order of age, were Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland and John Hoyland. Patrick Caulfield.
They were friends and all – despite their stylistic differences – were chosen by their contemporary Leslie Waddington to join the lauded Waddington Gallery in London’s Cork Street.
Moon’s development as a painter was the most complex of the four. As an art teacher (one of his students, (Sir) Christopher Le Brun, became President of the Royal Academy) and an artist, he honed his skills as a painter, printmaker, collagist and printmaker, largely inspired by his oil paintings. Later work by Georges Braque.
Braque, on the other hand, was inspired by his memories of an incident when, as a soldier in World War I, his Batman turned a bucket into a barbecue with some cocaine and a few strokes of the bayonet.
“I realized that everything is subject to metamorphosis, everything changes according to circumstances,” Braque wrote. The artist, who co-founded Cubism with Picasso, saw the workplace, the studio, from the age of 60 onwards, as a trigger for, as Moon writes, “an immersion in his own private obsessions.”
This obsession with memory and metamorphosis suited the Moon’s determined and investigative nature.
Moon’s last dealer, Alan Cristea of the eponymous gallery and formerly his print publisher at Waddington’s, described him as “a truly radical artist whose achievements were overshadowed by his own modesty.”
These achievements include Senior Lecturer at the Slade School of Art (1973-90); solo exhibition at Tate Gallery, 1976; first prize, John Moores 12 Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1980; Gulbenkian Print Prize, 1984; and Royal Academician, 1994.
Michael Moon was born in Edinburgh on 9 November 1937. When the war took his father to India, his mother, a talented amateur artist, moved in with her mother in Blackpool with her two sons. The beach became his playground and a memory that contributed to the sad seascapes in his final exhibition.
After the war, they moved to London, where her mother, who was divorced, worked as a staff artist at the Daily Mirror. The children attended a private boarding school in Shoreham-on-Sea in West Sussex.
Thanks to his mother, Moon’s first job was writing on speech bubbles at Amalgamated Press. National Service with the Educational Union in Germany was followed by Chelsea School of Art, where Patrick Caulfield was a fellow student.
His most influential teacher was Michael Andrews, who taught him useful painting techniques, especially masking a surface to concentrate on one section at a time.
Most importantly, he discovered Braque’s studio paintings, which he chose as the subject of his thesis. In the late Mel Gooding’s monograph, Moon wrote that “an artist’s own concerns” are “more likely to prove very important and valuable” than “awareness of what is going on artistically, socially, and politically.”
He went on to postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art and returned to teach at Chelsea, where Caulfield and Hoyland also taught.
Moon’s first exhibition consisted mostly of paintings on formica “strips,” placed vertically at one-inch intervals and artfully fixed to create the impression of diffused color. They were shown in a room at Hodgkin’s London home. Hoyland brought Leslie Waddington to see him, and Moon’s artistic career began.
It was exhibited with Caulfield and Hodgkin at the Galerie Stadler in Paris in 1972. A year later they were included in the exhibition “La peinture anglaise aujourd’hui” at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris. That same year, Moon was kidnapped from Chelsea by William Coldstream to teach at the Slade School of Art.
The cool clarity of the strip paintings was replaced by Braque-influenced interaction with the studio and metamorphosis. Moon’s printmakings were an incentive: process and content were literally fused with the studio’s contents (especially floorboards, which provided grainy backgrounds) with prints such as brass rubbings or monotype printing; this became the basis for concentrated event paintings.
They were hung loosely rather than stretched to create unpredictable combinations. These “Hanging Pictures” formed the Tate exhibition in 1976.
Moon’s first marriage, to Carola Kline, ended in divorce, and in 1977 he married painter Anjum Khan. His visits to relatives in India encouraged him to use vibrant colours. He was fascinated by the displacement of people, artifacts, and goods. It was all grist for the mill of his studio paintings.
In 1982, while on a flight with his family, including his sons Timur and Adam, to serve as an artist-in-residence at the Prahran School of Art in Melbourne, his Boeing 747’s four engines failed and he drowned in ash from a volcanic eruption. . It was a terrible half hour.
Three engines were restarted in time for an emergency landing in Jakarta. “There was a lot of kissing on the runway” was his typically pithy comment. The “Jakarta Incident” is aviation history.
The evolution of the Moon has been marked by dramatic changes. In 1992 floorboards, doors etc. He exhibited studio paintings that incorporated more complex Indian and other still life elements rather than overprinting. These paintings further expanded Braque’s subject matter in materiality and scope.
Yet, as Gooding writes, for all their diversity, Moon’s prints and paintings “invariably serve as focal points for quiet and reflexive contemplation.”
After his second divorce, he met his third wife, Swedish artist Philippa Stjernsward, in 2000. They traveled to many places, including India, and her satisfaction was reflected in her latest exhibition (Cristea Roberts Gallery, 2019).
Cold clarity returned, not in abstraction but in the form of grand seascapes. Devoid of color and collage, the grain of the printed floorboards evoked the waves and ripples of the seas of his childhood. The serene intimations of mortality are reduced in one instance to a single figure in distant silhouette; in another, a monochrome flotilla of small anchored boats fading into misty invisibility; and finally to the dots of their single light in the darkness of the night.
Mick Moon is survived by his wife Philippa Stjernsward and two sons from his second marriage.
Mick Moon was born on November 9, 1937, died on February 13, 2024.