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MERV MORIARTY
Merv Moriarty has spent a lifetime committed to art and its teaching. Born in 1937 in northern NSW Moriarty's work is represented in prominent Australian and international collections including the Queensland and New South Wales Art Galleries.
Moriarty has been a major prize winner and finalist and his career has spanned traditional realism through to abstract art and powerful figurative works. This figurative style, which focuses on the human body, has led to an ever-growing imposing and even confrontational body of work which continues to inspire comment and recognition.
Moriarty has been quoted as saying: "All humanity must embrace the feminine side. Women possess great courage, it's a great attribute."
While a great Australian artist in his own right, Moriarty's true life calling has been the teaching of art. An anti-elitist philosophy; sense of adventure and inherent understanding of this calling led Moriarty to found the Flying Art School, first known as EastAus Art School – after gaining an unrestricted pilots licence in the early 1970s.
Moriarty learnt to fly in order to found the school, which led him to to remote areas in Queensland and Northern NSW teaching art to many people who were starved of culture and often even company. The Flying Arts as it is now known continues to this day, a legacy of Moriarty's vision and humanity.
After a number of years running the Flying Art School Moriarty moved on to head private art schools in Brisbane and Melbourne and is today considered by many as one of the best art educators in Australia.
Over the past six years Moriarty has been inspired to put all this knowledge - his life's work - into two art texts, one on colour and the other on draftsmanship. The text on draftsmanship, The Eyes Mind - the artist and the draftsman has now been self-published and handbound by Moriarty and is considered a work of art in itself.
It reinforces Moriarty's belief that for any true meaning to emerge from modern art, contemporary artists need a clear grasp of form and structure, which can only be taught through seeing the subject and the world from a different perspective.
As well as write and produce books Moriarty continues to teach and paint. He lives on the Far South Coast of NSW with his partner eminent Australian artist, environmentalist and businesswoman Prue Acton OBE.
Hear more about Merv Moriarty's life story as he tells it to the ABC's Richard Fidler on the Conversations program at www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/02/27/2503244.htm. |
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