Greg Moon Art Gallery & Studio

Located on Gallery Row in the central historical district, Greg Moon Art prides itself in continuing the fine art traditions of Taos. We specialize in contemporary works ranging from oils to assemblage. Our diverse genres of work include realism, outsider art, and pop-surrealism.

Our annual national juried show endeavors to provide a showcase for up and coming talents to gain exposure in the New Mexico art market while helping to provide visibility for the overall profile of the arts in Taos. Our shows are geared towards exhibiting artists and genres that are under-represented in the New Mexico region.

About Greg Moon

Greg Moon returned to New Mexico following a 22-year absence shortly after receiving his BFA from the University of Texas in Austin. The son of an artist and an educator, his introduction to the arts started early. Greg has been showing professionally since 1989 in galleries and museum shows; at this point, he has participated in over 120 exhibitions and has amassed 18 one-man shows.

His work is split between several diverse bodies of work that reflect his varied aesthetic tastes and interests. At present, his artwork includes more traditional media such as watercolor, gouache, and oil painting. He also produces work in the realms of assemblage and mixed media.

Representational Work

At present, Greg's work reflects two major interests that have shaped his subject matter for well over two decades. These involve roads and nighttime. His continued fascination with all things nocturnal stems from many sources; the most obvious for him is the evocative quality of nighttime. Although his work has an almost nostalgic quality, the use of night totally changes the context of any memories or associations the viewer might have. Having something that seems familiar in the context of night alters perceptions and makes emotional responses more profound.

The other theme present in his work, roads, has a fairly broad range of gradations as well. Roads, highways, streets: all of these and more work as obvious metaphors for a series of themes and emotions. The pathway to enlightenment, the highway to hell, the road not taken: examples of the votive values we ascribe to these objects that tie us all together. The lore and legend of the open road has seminally influenced the development of our society. Much like the sentimental ideals of the cowboy era, the nostalgia of the freedom of the open road is an idealized perception of reality. This idealized view carries a preformed perception that is strongly associated with the western part of the USA. This modern mythology, in large part, drives Greg's work.

The final, and probably most important, aspect of his work is that of the aesthetic. In an age where many artists elicit emotional responses through techniques such as shock-value, Greg and many other artists choose to pursue the dead art of painting. With so much bombarding us in our modern society, we seldom give ourselves license to let our minds wander. Greg hopes that his work serves as a catalyst for the viewer. If his work can serve as a visual trigger for someone to do a bit of healthy daydreaming, he has achieved his desired affect.

Conceptual Work

Greg's most recent work is the amalgamation of his representational body of work and his inherent love for collage/ assemblage. This work is a little more expressionistic/ hap-hazard/ slap-dash than his past work. There has been a conscious effort to not get too cautious with the images, thus leading to a more direct and painterly quality unfiltered by overly deliberate consideration. There are still many formal elements and related themes that echo back to his previous body of work - night-time/ roads/ silhouettes. What has evolved in this new format is the narrative. Previous works referring to titles (literature/ movies/ music) were often reinterpreted and re-presented in the work itself. This is still present in the new work, but it is much more cryptic and subtle.