John H Moody

Biography for a friendly fool

‘Biography for a friendly fool’: a first thought to tempt potential readers beyond this sentence. Self deprecating as I always am.

Self deprecation: From someone who paints, writes poetry, takes photographs? Though most of these activities have been conducted in the small interstices of this life: between interludes as a lowly civil servant, political and community activist, local councillor, parliamentary candidate, art teacher, computer studies teacher…

…culminating in work with the disenfranchised and disempowered, those we can all cross the other side of the road to avoid pricking our shriveled social conscience. It has been an active life.

Visual work

My work in painting, photography and screen printing has always been figurative. I aspire to be expressive, and my favourite painters are expressive: Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. These artists give a sense of my melancholic temperament, and sensual nature.  Add to that an interest in modern figurative painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Freud’s need to have a close relationship with the people he studied in paintings which reflected tense, highly charged situations. In his muted nudes and Bacon’s distorted portraits, I would aspire to such a masterful use of the brush, and, always fall short of that aspiration.