INTERPRETING LIFE Collector’s Focus: Figurative
at a gallery in California and learned that he had been brought up only a few miles from the Arnot and had won a Scholastic Art Award there when he was in high school.
Works came into the collection because of the growing recognition of the RR exhibitions, including Wade’s stunning Nude with Painted Screen. It had been purchased by a couple who bought primarily non-objective art. The husband loved the painting. The wife didn’t. Shortly after her husband died, she donated it to the museum.
Many of the artists in the exhibitions have grown in their careers, continuing to produce fine representational art. Others have changed directions. One of those is Diana Moore whose monumental concrete heads and life-size carbon steel sculptures first caught my eye at Allan Stone Gallery. Diana is never afraid of experimenting or working with difficult materials. We borrowed her carbon steel Athlete for one of the exhibitions. The strength of the athlete, a contemporary Greek goddess, was emphasized by the carbon steel. We loved it even as we cursed trying to lift it up onto its base after the winch stuck a foot from its goal.
I went to an opening here in Santa Fe and saw colorful, small, aerial landscapes by “Diana Moore” but was sure it couldn’t be the same Diana Moore. I was wrong. Diana had decided she was through with figurative work and, inspired by the view from airplane windows, she began to experiment with materials and techniques to produce her Earth Etchings in Forton MG, a modified gypsum.
Speaking of Santa Fe, Stuart Chase, who was then director of the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in nearby Corning, New York, and is now executive director of the Monterey Museum of Art in California, asked me