Mentor
Fr. Bill Moore, abstract expressionist painter who died in 2020, was known for his quiet mentoring of others, particularly emerging artists. He was also known for his frequent invitations, reaching out to people and encouraging them to touch his paintings, to feel what there is to be known in them. Before I purchased one of his larger paintings during his last exhibition at The Progress Gallery, I responded to that invitation and reached out to make contact with the art; it was a momentary but transformational experience.
In the weeks before his death, Fr. Bill executed a large number of smaller paintings, each a little more than 5 inches square, each having his trademark symbolism. Each sold for under $200 — a far cry from his usual asking price in the many thousands of dollars — making them accessible to many who could not otherwise afford one of his works.
It is this generosity of spirit that was typical of his life, as an artist and a priest, of reaching out to others.
It was that same generosity that was partly behind the use of found objects in his work. As he expressed it, the greatest gift to an artist is to be able to take something that is worthless, useless, and recognize its sacredness, and then transform it into something beautiful that speaks to someone of things eternal. For Fr. Bill, that eternal thing was God.
One artist, who was beginning to get into “abstract and indeterminate but highly textured work,” took one of his paintings into Fr. Bill. He remembers,
I was in a muddle as to whether it was any good or not. I could tell from his wincing that he was put off with how busy the thing was. After a while, Bill went back to his workroom and returned with a piece of cardboard with a rectangle cut out of the center. He showed me how to move it around over the painting, isolating details as it they were the entire composition. Bill spent nearly a half hour with me, finding image after image from the same painting, that he declared, “Interesting,” or “Look at that!”*
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Fr. Bill, as he painted and mentored others, offered us a sense of wonder, a chance to transcend the hurry and the ordinary in the world; he offered us transformation and the opportunity to have our souls fed.
Through his offerings, we were given a gateway to our best selves.
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*story related by Kendall Johnson
This is the third of several works about Fr. Bill Moore and his art. I chose them as the inaugural series for the Interlude column in The Journal of Radical Wonder, because they are examples of an unexpected interlude that can be startlingly healing . My posts in this column will occur about every two weeks or so. However, I invite other writers to submit their own stories about transformative interludes in their lives.
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Kate Flannery is an Editor at Large at The Journal of Radical Wonder. She lives in the small college town, of Claremont, California, where she also practices law. Her essays, poetry and fiction have been published in Chiron Review, Emerge, Shark Reef, Ekphrastic Review, and Pure Slush as well as other literary journals. She was a finalist in Bellingham Review’s 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is currently working on a curated volume about Palmer Canyon after the Grand Prix Fire of 2003.
