The British painter Mick Moon, who has died aged 86, had a sophisticated understanding of the functions of an artwork – its ability to represent a range of subjects and experiences while remaining a unique object in its own right. His output ranged from pieces of calico or canvas that had been moulded around studio props, walls or floorboards, to his early “strip paintings” – bands of modulated colour on plastic – and his later semi-figurative works, of which the meaning is ineffable.
In the radiant hues and tactile surface of Embers (1991-92), for example, a glowing, meticulously detailed example of bidriware – metalware originally associated with Bidar in southern India – floats over a green and yellow background, as if some fragment of a transcendent reality has been discovered and translated into acrylic and silkscreen.
Despite its stimulation of the senses and references to Indian culture, the picture remains mysterious, set apart from the world to which it alludes.
Moon’s interest in creating works that were essentially mute objects with a strong material presence evolved from his admiration of Georges Braque. He was particularly interested in the studio paintings that the great French artist produced late in his career, decades after he and Picasso had invented Cubism. In Moon’s view, Braque’s “tableaux-objets” represented his “deep immersion in his own private obsessions and philosophy, translating objects and spaces into art through his uniquely personal vision”.
The debt to Braque conjures up a modernist era that has passed into history. Moreover, Moon’s close friends and peers when he was establishing his career during the 1960s included Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Caulfield and John Hoyland, all of whom predeceased him. Yet Moon’s paintings appear less like period pieces than those of his more famous contemporaries, partly because he always eschewed art movements and associations.
His works’ physical power, their ability to stimulate the tactile imagination as well as delight the eye, resists categorisation. Some of his most memorable images are imprinted with the patterns of wooden floorboards, which Moon transformed into ripples of water, contrasted with silhouettes of boats or human figures.
As so often, he was inspired to make this creative choice by a trip, in this case to Venice in 2007. The device of using the grain of timber in this way led him to represent not only the Venetian lagoon but also memories of the ocean in places from Goa and Mumbai to Fleetwood, in Lancashire.
Revealingly, Moon referred, when describing these works, to a “common thread” in his career, which he described as an emphasis on his own concerns, rather than “too much of an awareness of what is going on artistically, socially and politically at any particular moment”. Once again, it was to Braque that he attributed this tendency. “It is this example that has fed me throughout my career.”
Born in Edinburgh, Mick was the son of Marjory (nee Metcalfe) and Donald Moon. On the outbreak of the second world war his father was enlisted into the army, and Mick, with his mother and brother, Colin, moved to his grandmother Edith’s home in Blackpool.
Donald largely disappeared from family life after being sent to India for his service, and that posting sparked Mick’s enduring fascination with the country. After the war, Marjory started a career as a commercial artist in London, and Mick and his brother were sent to a boarding school in the Sussex town of Shoreham-by-Sea.
In 1955 Marjory, who was by then working for the Daily Mirror, found a job for Mick working on comics for the Amalgamated Press, but the following year he was called for national service, spending two years in the Education Corps, including a spell in Celle in Germany, where he taught map reading. On return he began his degree at Chelsea School of Art. It was there that he met Caulfield and encountered Braque’s work, on which he wrote his final-year thesis, in 1962.
After a few months on the MA course at the Royal College of Art, Moon returned to Chelsea as a teacher, with Hoyland as one of his colleagues. In 1969 he took a studio in Hodgkin’s Kensington house, where Caulfield also worked, and had his first solo exhibition, at Waddington Galleries.
For a while he concentrated on creating his strip paintings: he displayed these, together with art by Caulfield and Hodgkin, at the Galerie Stadler in Paris in 1972, as well as, a year later, in a larger group show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
At the same time, Moon took up a teaching post at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and began to turn away from experiments with colour to the compositions based on the contents of his studio.
This successful period included an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1976, a tour of India in the early 80s with his first wife, Anjum Khan, whom he had married in 1977, and an artist’s residency at the Prahran School of Art and Design in Melbourne in 1982.
As well as painting, Moon explored different forms of graphic art, for which he won the Gulbenkian print award in 1984. The complex, multilayered style that he developed in various media emphasised his images’ material qualities, at times evoking a palimpsest or a wall of graffiti. It was, above all, his work’s physical depth and beauty that gave it a lasting appeal, especially in many summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy, to which Moon was elected in 1994.
His first marriage ended in divorce in 2001. Moon is survived by his second wife, Philippa Stjernsward, whom he married in 2013; the children from his first marriage, Timur and Adam; and a grandson, Marcus.
• Mick Moon, artist, born 9 November 1937; died 13 February 2024
