MEMORIES
“notes on rob moore”
Written February 22, 1979; Published in BVAU NEWS | Boston Visual Arts Union | April 1979 | Vol. 7 No. 8
By Chris Mesarch
For seven years during the time I've known Rob he didn't paint. He tried it once or twice, but it wasn't where his interests were at the time. He chose to make posters instead.
Because of its immediacy, its wide scope, its cheapness to the public, and because it's produced in multiples; the poster is a great communicator. This chosen alternative meant working with a group of artists instead of what he had been doing which was working alone in his studio. The group is still together and is named The Graphic Workshop. Rob is still a part of it, but not as much as he used to be because he's gone back to painting.
I became friends with Rob at the Workshop; before that I was a student of his at Mass. College of Art. I remember the first day he walked into class. We were a group of sophomore graphic design majors, expecting to be taught immediately how to design great record album covers. After all, the course was named "Design".
"I'm going to teach you all about color," he announced. First things first.
We protested. We figured we knew enough about color from our basic design course in freshman year.
It was his first day in a new job and with perhaps more bravado than we realized he said, "But, I teach one hell of a color course.'
And he did. Only it turned out to be not just about color. Sometimes he'd talk about drawing, or organize a trip to another city to see an exhibit, maybe start a heated class discussion about contemporary design, or about T.V., or about his favorite topic: movies. He'd arrive at class late and breathless and launch with enthusiasm into: "I saw the worst sculpture show yesterday.", or “‘You should all see ‘The Battle of Algiers.’”, “This homework is terrible, you all. How can you think you know about color?". Then he'd take us to the drugstore for coffee. It was a class about more than color, more than design. It was class in an artist's perception of the world and in learning how to see.
Two years later, when I was a senior, the entire college went on strike to protest the Cambodian Invasion. Classes were cancelled for the last month of the school year and most students took part in some kind of antiwar activity. It was May, 1970. We students in the graphic design department designed and silkscreened posters day and night.
One morning at dawn, after we had been printing all night, Rob appeared in the doorway to the room where we were printing. He stood there holding a bulging Dunkin' Doughnuts bag.
"Coffee and doughnuts, y'all?" He never left us. That was when he gave up painting for seven years and we started The Graphic Workshop.
It was right after a successful one man show of his paintings. They were paintings he did based on the shape of a broken sheet of glass he stumbled over on a Beacon Hill sidewalk one day. The curve of the broken edge immediately fascinated him and he used it as a basis for exploring line and shape and color. He worked exclusively with that curve for two years. I remember how beautiful the paintings in the show were and how impressed I was to see an artist explore an idea so thoroughly and so clearly. The curve was in all the paintings, they mirrored each other and were different from each other, variations on a theme. Now, ten years later, I can still get a sense of that show as a complete entity, the experience of standing in the middle of the gallery space and slowly revolving from painting to painting. Each painting was complete in iteself and also part of a progression.
But that was behind him in May, 1970 and he offered the use of his studio to those of us who wanted to continue producing posters. The four or five of us who decided to give it a try found ourselves hooked up with a man who was, or seemed to be, confident that we could make something out of nothing but an idea. That was what the Graphic Workshop started with, an idea and Rob's loft. He moved to a small apartment.
Our equipment was ridiculously primitive. We saved tin cans from home to mix paint in and cleaned off our paint mixing sticks and reused them. In an age of high speed silkscreen presses we silkscreened our posters by hand. It was several years before we could afford a silkscreen press.
We spent long hours together in teams of three people, printing posters. One would place the paper under the screen, a second would squeegee the paint onto the page, a third would remove it from under the screen and check it for flaws. We all grew to know each other over the printing table; talking, singing, and joking to pass the time. Everyone did everything at the Workshop: designing, printing, floor- sweeping, running to the liquor store for beer.
Rob continued to teach full time at Mass. Art and to put the rest of his time into the Workshop. His energy seemed constant. There was no detail small enough to slip by him. It might be midnight on a Sunday and we might be printing an overdue job, longing to finish, and perhaps a color we were printing would be drying a shade too light.
“We have to stop and remix the color”, he would say. And we would. Because of the desire for quality that propelled him and which was catching. If the first two ideas behind the Workshop were about the poster as an alternative art form and about artists working together, then the third was about quality. Time and money were sacrificed for it. It was never really stated that way at the beginning, it just happened that way. That was how he worked, pursuing an idea or an image until it was right.
Sometimes we would protest against his suggestion that we redo a design or remix a color. Sometimes we would all fight about it. If we refused to see it his way, he would stop the printing anyway, remix the color and show us that it had to be done. Sometimes we won out and it stayed the same. There are posters today that Rob will look at and say, “Yeah, I like it, but that red should be darker.”
Many long, hard days were softened by Rob's appearance after his school day, breezing into the shop with that same breathlessness and lateness we'd known in him as students. This time he'd have a bottle of gin in one hand and a bottle of tonic in the other and we'd all have a drink.
We would all have meetings to discuss what we were doing, what our plans would be, how we would implement them, and just for the sake of talking and having a drink together. Talking together became an important part of it. The shop was, and still is, about communication in all ways.
We saw him invest the same energy in his own artwork that he invested in the shop and in teaching. Although he wasn't painting he was making editions of silk- screen prints. Only a handful were brought to completion; mostly he was doing what came to be known as "tests". Tests were his way of exploring specific images the same way he explored the broken glass shape he found on the side- walk. He would take an idea and silk- screen it in different versions. Over the years I saw him working with grids, with combining silkscreen prints with drawings, trying out photographic images, combining cloth and silkscreen, studying the square and how it was different from a rectangle. He was learning the vocabulary of his art; his lines, shapes, colors. He must have tested his ideas on thousands of sheets of paper, there were piles of his tests all over the shop. A lot of the tests were dead ends for him, but he would salvage the successful parts and rethink them in the next set of tests.
All the art work was shared there, and he would tack his current tests up on the wall. “See my new studies”, he would say.
“I don't understand them, Rob.”
Then he would talk about them, explaining what he was trying to do. “I'm using a grid here, because I like the way it flattens out the image”, or “I'm trying to make the white of the paper as important as the colored part.”, or “I'm trying to understand why I like using the square so much.” His present paintings could probably be traced piece by piece back through those tests, even through the ones that were dead ends. It was a rare and lucky chance to see an artist work, pushing ideas to their limits, visualizing them again and again to understand just how he wanted to use them. We saw starts, stops and direct routes to the final product. He always took pains to talk to us about them, what he saw as their suc- cesses and failings. He gave the same attention to our work, continuing to be a teacher to us as we worked at the Workshop.
In 1972 the Workshop was invited to participate in an exhibit called "Man and His Environment" in Rob's home town, Sewanee, Tennessee. We piled into a van and went to Tennessee with silkscreens for printing T-shirts outdoors and posters to exhibit and sell.
We stayed at his parents' house. The house is at the end of a long dirt road with encouraging signs along the way that say things like, "Don't turn back, you're almost there," and "Soon." It's on a high cliff overlooking a mountain valley in a place called "Jump Off". It was built by his parents in 1965. They are now in their late seventies. His father, "R.P." is a retired private school headmaster, now working with Common Cause and drawing political cartoons. His mother, Katryne, manages a community thrift shop for the town hospital. While they were finishing an addition to the house a few years ago, Katryne fell off the roof. She broke her foot, and with the true family spirit recovered completely.
The entire town of Sewanee took part in entertaining us. It was my first taste of Southern Hospitality. We were guests at everybody's house, fed and partied the whole week we stayed there. People with names like Boo (a woman) and Doobie (a man), would make their way down the dirt road to bring us big bowls of red beans and rice. We were welcomed like returning children, even though it was our first visit, because we were with Rob, a favorite returning son.
I've known Rob for eleven years, I see him all the time and I still always learn something from him. A thousand things come to mind at the mention of his name: intelligence, talk for the love of talking, conversations that melt into one conversation because of that constant energy that devotes itself to any subject worth talking about; generosity, his open door, his everpresent welcome, the dinners he cooks so well always having enough for one more person; high spirits that come from some mysterious source, along with the energy; and then the pleasure of seeing his pleasure in doing paintings that seem to flow from him so easily. But one knows they weren't easy, having seen the years of work that went before, the tests.
I visit him in his present loft and look around at his current paintings on the walls, receiving inspiration from them. I tell him that I think he's a wonderful painter.
He sits across from me, looks around, refills my wine glass and says he thinks he's just about ready to start some real paintings. ■