by Mick Moon, who has died aged 86, was the youngest of four influential and internationally respected English painters born in the 1930s and who rose to prominence from the 1960s: the three eldest , in order of age, are Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland and Patrick Caulfield.
They were friends, and their contemporary, Leslie Waddington, chose them all – despite the difference in style – to enter his London Waddington Gallery in Cork Street.
Moon’s development as a painter was the most complex of the four. As an art teacher – one of his students, (Sir) Christopher Le Brun, became President of the Royal Academy – and as an artist, he brought his skills as a painter, printmaker, collegiate and printer to great use. Fat paintings, inspired by the later work of Georges Braque.
Braque, in turn, was inspired by his memory of an incident as a soldier in the First World War, when his batman, with coke and some sticks in his baguette, turned a bucket into flags.
“Everything, I realized, is subject to metamorphosis, everything changes according to circumstances,” wrote Braque. Co-founder of Cubism with Picasso, from the age of 60 he took his place of work, the studio, as the inspiration for, as Moon wrote, “an immersion in his own private obsessions”.
This obsession with memory and metamorphosis suited Moon’s determined and exploratory nature.
Alan Cristea, Moon’s last dealer, of the gallery of the same name, and earlier a print publisher at Waddington’s, described him as “a truly radical artist whose achievements were hidden by his own modesty”.
These achievements included Senior Lecturer at the Slade School of Art, 1973-90; solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 1976; first prize, John Moores Exhibition 12, Walker Gallery, Liverpool, 1980; Gulbenkian Print Award, 1984; and the Royal Academy, 1994.
Michael Moon was born in Edinburgh on 9 November 1937. When the war took his father to India, his mother, a talented amateur artist, moved with her two sons to live with her mother in Blackpool. The beach became a playground, a memory that added to the elegant seascapes of his final shows.
After the war they moved to London, where his now divorced mother was working as a staff artist at the Daily Mirror. The boys went to a private boarding school in Shoreham-on-Sea, West Sussex.
Moon’s first job, thanks to his mother, was for Amalgamated Press doing speech bubble lettering. After National Service in Germany with the Education Corps was Chelsea School of Art, where Patrick Caulfield was a fellow student.
His most influential teacher was Michael Andrews, who taught him useful painting techniques, particularly covering a surface to focus on one item at a time.
Crucially, he discovered Braque’s studio paintings, which he chose as the subject of his thesis. In the monograph by the late Mel Gooding, Moon wrote that “the artist’s own concerns” are “more important and more likely to be valuable” than “a consideration of what is going on artistically, socially and politically”.
He went on to graduate at the Royal College of Art, returning to teach in Chelsea, where Caulfield and Hoyland also taught.
Moon’s first exhibition was of paintings, made mostly on formica “strips” slatted vertically at one-inch intervals and glued to create a full sense of embedded color. They were shown in a room in Hodgkin’s house in London. Hoyland took Leslie Waddington to see it, and Moon’s artistic career was launched.
In 1972 he exhibited with Caulfield and Hodgkin at Galerie Stadler, Paris. A year later they were included in “La peinture anglaise aujourd’hui”, Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris. In the same year William Coldstream poached Moon from Chelsea to teach at the Slade School of Art.
The blond clarity of strip painting was replaced by a Braque-influenced engagement with the studio and metamorphosis. Moon’s printmaking was an inspiration: processing and material were literally fused with prints, such as brass rubbing or monotype printing, of the contents of the studio (especially floorboards, providing a grainy background), which became the basis for pictures of concentrated events.
They are hung loosely, rather than stretched, to create unexpected combinations. These “Hanging Paintings” created his Tate exhibition in 1976.
Moon’s first marriage, to Carola Kline, ended in divorce, and in 1977 he married the painter Anjum Khan. Visits to her relations in India inspired him to introduce vivid colors. He was fascinated by displacement – people, artefacts and goods. His studio pictures were grist to the mill.
On a 1982 flight with his family, now including his sons Timur and Adam, to be artists-in-residence at the Prahran School of Art, Melbourne, all four engines of the Boeing 747 were cut out, choked with ash from a volcanic eruption . A terrible half hour later.
Three engines restarted in time for an emergency landing at Jakarta. “It was a big kiss on the runway” was his usually laconic comment. The “Jakarta Incident” is aviation history.
Moon’s evolution was marked by dramatic changes. In 1992 he exhibited studio paintings that introduced Indian elements and still other still lifes instead of making impressions of floorboards, doors, and so on. These paintings further expanded Braque’s material, both in content and scope.
However, as Gooding writes, for all their variety, Moon’s prints and paintings “serve in each case as a focus for quiet and reflexive contemplation”.
After a second divorce, in 2000 he met his third wife, the Swedish artist Philippa Stjernsward. They traveled widely, including to India, whose satisfaction can be seen in his final exhibition (Cristea Roberts Gallery, 2019).
Clarity returned, not abstractly but in the form of large seascapes. Colorless and collaged, the grain of the printed floorboards reflected the waves and ripples of his boyhood seas. Calm intimations of mortality, the subject in one case is reduced to a single figure in a distant silhouette; in another, to a monochrome fleet of small boats at anchor receding into the invisibility of fog; and finally, only to the dots of their individual lights in the darkness of the night.
He is survived by his wife Philippa Stjernsward Mick Moon, and two sons from his second marriage.
Mick Moon, born 9 November 1937, died 13 February 2024
