My name is Ted Moore. I am an ink painter and a woodworker based in Hesperus, Colorado. My practice is grounded in realism, woodwork, and art history, and it focuses on the depiction of flowers, lichen, and trees—their material nature, their use, and their metaphorical significance.
I discover such flora in the course of my hikes in the mountains and deserts that surround my home. If I find a small branch, I might bring it back to my studio and paint it from life. If it is a large deadfall, I take multiple photos and work from those. My regular hikes in La Plata Canyon – just up the road from my studio – now take me past the subjects of many of my past works. I enjoy that.
The paintings themselves I create with brushes and india ink on gessoed panels. Typically, I’ll either leave the background white or gild it with gold leaf. My skills as a woodworker have enabled me to expand my art to include devotional forms of cabinetry, especially triptychs. By “triptych,” I don’t mean simply an artwork in three parts. Rather, I use the word in the medieval sense of a “painting with doors.” A triptych is a devotional work that frames a subject in both space and time.
Like their medieval antecedents, my triptychs have imagery on their doors both on the exterior (when the triptych is closed) and the interior (when it is opened). Unlike their medieval antecedents, my triptychs don’t intend to connect the viewer with a transcendent and detached God. Rather, they intend to reveal the transformative power of our immediate, natural environment.
Trees, as the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “save me, and daily,” through both their beauty and what they teach me. Observed closely, trees deconstruct common conceptions of the nature of being and how the world supposedly works. Our world doesn’t consist of humankind versus nature. Our world is one of profound entanglement. To my thinking, trees – particularly in their own moments of transformation, their regenerative life cycle – reveal this entanglement most exquisitely. It is my hope that my artwork serves to create a devotional moment, one that viewers can then carry outward and into the practice of their own lives.
