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Overview
Multi-award winning artist, David Scott Moore, was born in London, before moving next to St. Leonards Forest Sussex, which had a significant effect on his experience of landscapes, as did visits to his family in the Scottish Countryside. A studio-based and open-air landscape painter, based in Brighton and Hove. He has exhibited widely in the UK, particularly in the South of England and London, in group exhibitions, fairs and solo-shows, and has collectors world-wide. He is known for his minimalist, intuitive, atmospheric oil landscapes, bordering on the abstract and representational.
Of one of his solo shows, Reflections on Wild Brooks, 20 en plein airs, ROSA magazine, said, “Moore takes you into the wild, where there is barely a trace of mankind, and brings you back the communion he has had with the elements”. “A visual equivalent of unfolding time.” Geoff Hands (Artist & Writer). In the exhibition catalogue foreword, Mick Jackson (writer) “…painting ‘en plein air’ provokes an intuitive response to what the artist sees before them – something that is not easily recaptured back in the studio. In his essay, Walking, Henry David Thoreau wrote that, ‘When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’ …Some of the appeal of David’s new collection of paintings was the fact that they were free from the presence of people. More recently, I’ve come to see how these landscapes are, in fact, inhabited… deeply inhabited – by sky, by hills, by water – and ultimately, of course, by us, the observer. David went out and observed, responded, recorded. Now we occupy that same perspective, in his stead.”
In 2024, he was awarded the Winsor and Newton prize at the Royal Institute of oil Painters Annual Exhibition. He has exhibited at Regency Townhouse Museum, Hove and at Petersfield Gallery & Museum at the inaugural South Downs Open exhibition. In 2023, he exhibited with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and in 2022, he exhibited at the London Mall Galleries, SW1 at: The Royal Society of British Artists, The New English Art Club and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.
In 2019, he donated to the South Downs Trust Auction, Goodwood and donated to the ‘Big Heart Auction’ exhibition at the Brighton Dome and completed a Sussex vineyard painting residency. From 2017 to the present, he has exhibited regularly in London and the South East. He was invited to show a group of paintings at the ING Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London SW1. “David’s dramatic abstracted landscapes are a masterclass in light and tone, evoking the outdoors in its all awe, wildness and romanticism” – Mall Galleries, London SW1, 2018. In 2016, he won first prize with ‘Sienna Panorama V’, in Paint-Out & Sussex Life Magazine’s Landscape Painter of the Year. Magazine Editor C.Burns, “the viewer is seduced to come ever closer to the work, much as we are when the landscape is before us.”
He reached the final judging for selection of the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, Mall Galleries London SW1, in 2015, exhibiting in the show 2016. Somerset House Art Critic, Stephen Doherty, selected David’s painting ‘New Forest Landscape I’ for the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition 2015 at the Mall Galleries London SW1.
David says of his work, “Painting outside ‘en plein air’ affords a spatial freedom. The feelings and thoughts that arise during the process of creating a landscape outside are subtly recorded within the painting in ways that reach beyond initial intentions of design or thought. An evolving set of processes, partially formed from memory of the live locations and partially from the subsequent studio discoveries. Ultimately, I hope to invite close observation of the spatial interplay between a landscape painting’s imagery, its surface and the whole object on matters of: space, colour, form and complex experience.”
His paintings’ locations have included: The South Downs, Sussex Forersts and waterways, The New Forest, Hampshire, Tuscan mountains, Alpilles Mountains, The South of France and the riversides of Avignon and Arles, The Arun Valley’s protected wetlands, The Malvern Hills, Herefordshire, Lindisfarne and Scotland.
In his background, he was taught by painter John Macraffry during Art Diploma, gaining a distinction, then achieved an honours degree in 3D Art from Manchester Metropolitan University, which included thesis’ correspondences with Turner Prize Sculptor, Richard Deacon. Afterwards, he worked in the arts industry on the large works of Anselm Keifer and Anish Kapoor as a sculptor, then taught as a lecturer, before becoming solely a landscape painter.