[ab-moore-blog]

[ab-moore-blog]

A fun little flyer for a friend. The event is a benefit for North Carolina-based QORDS, a music-based summer camp for queer youth and kids from queer families. The original artwork is an 8.5x11″ gouache and watercolor painting.

[ab-moore-blog]

Some new little gouache paintings... themes of swords, numbers, and the scorpion. Death in the desert (the scorpionic ourobos which stings itself), unsent postcards from Death Valley, strange new moons. Nines, tens, and twos.

[ab-moore-blog]

On November 7 I was really lucky to show some shrinky dinks in the third annual Get Small group show curated by Session Space and hosted by Turpentine Gallery in Oakland, CA. It was exciting to share wall space with so many great artists.

In the last month I’ve been drawing much of the same thing, mostly highways and scenes from car windows. Memories from the desert were helpful in establishing a vivid color palette after working mostly in black and white for the last year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the desert.

[ab-moore-blog]

October has been a busy month!!

I gave my first set of matching friendship tattoos to Roberto & Blair based on Francesco del Cossa’s Saint Lucy, with minor variations between them. A few days before Halloween, I collaborated on an interior mural for Espolon Tequila with Anson Cyr at The Willows in San Francisco, using pastel transfers from large scale prints of Espolon’s graphics. And after a lot of sketching and revising with feedback from the editor, I am just wrapping up my contribution to Slow Holler’s tarot deck, as well- more on that later. I am also thankful to have received a copy of Baltimore artist Sick Lion’s first vinyl release Overturned Trashcan Lid- I did the inkwash sleeve illustration for this release in Baltimore over a year ago!!

[ab-moore-blog]

My first show poster in a long time... Hey Bay Area, I want to make your flyers!! 

For Baltimore friends Baklavaa. I enjoyed playing with hand-drawn variations of classic gothic & western typefaces, and looking to Audubon as a stylistic reference. I had the opportunity to use an ink brush pen for the first time, and now I don’t know why I would use anything else in graphic black and white work.

The final poster has since been edited to correct the address of the venue from “1200″ to “1700″.

[ab-moore-blog]

My first attempt at “making a painting” in what feels like two or three years. I get so caught up in materiality, and my aversion to finer materials like oil paint, that it’s easier for me to open up to this idea of “making a painting” when using more commonplace media.

This piece started as play with Spirit tattoo stencil transfer paper. I wet the wood panel and applied a collage of stencil transfers made from sketchbook drawings. I’m really into the indigo pigment of the transfer ink, and parts of the wood that had more water on the surface (bottom left of panel) distorted the ink into what looks like a blue ballpoint pen puddle. 

This piece will be for sale at an upcoming group show on October 1st in San Francisco. More on that later. I’m about to leave the Bay for a two and a half week cross-country road trip, so more work like this will have to wait until I get back in October.

[ab-moore-blog]

Here are some tattoo flash & custom design sketches from the last month. Anubis, cowboy clock, stabbed jungle cat, and dog in car window have all been tattooed. At the bottom is one of my favorite recent pieces. Ari is a Scorpio, so I gave her a forearm tattoo to show off while she plays violin. The scorpion has candles for eyes and a tattoo of a scorpion on its claw. It’s pretty wild.

[ab-moore-blog]

I’m excited to announce that I will be contributing cards to the Slow Holler Tarot Deck. This collaborative deck seeks to “amplify southern voices, voices with southern ties, queer voices, and voices that speak from the intersections of those identities.” I’ve been watching so many talented artists and friends contribute to this project since its conception over a year ago, so the opportunity to contribute something of my own has been an honor I am very grateful for! S/O to the homie always looking out for me, Anson Cyr!!

The Slow Holler deck is a very special project. For starters, the Slow Holler group is based in the great state of North Carolina. I’m happy to see artists in my home state using their resources as a hub for this kind of collaboration. It’s comforting to know this community exists there.

What I’ve seen so far- from the project’s organization, to its manifestation- is beautiful and thoughtful. It is refreshingly non-binary and non-hierarchal, with artists using more localized symbologies and creative imagery that significantly deviates from what one might expect in a more traditional tarot deck. As much as I can appreciate Rider-Waite spin-offs, there’s something more intimate and engaging to me about the variety of artists’ hands, style, and ideas converging into a coherent vision in the Slow Holler deck.

I’m designing the Architect of Branches, the Eight of Vessels, and the Two of Stones. Here are a few roughs from my sketchbook. More on my designs once the cards are closer to completion. You can preorder the deck here.

[ab-moore-blog]

I found two free boxes of tea candles and filled my pockets and bag with beach rocks at Taco Bell beach in Pacifica. So I’ve been making rock candles. They’re single use candle assemblages, (incorporating driftwood, glue, polymer clay, and other plastics) that become rather useless sculptural objects (paperweights?) after burning. 

I’m selling them locally (Bay Area) for $10 each and carrying to Baltimore for $15 for pickup September 19-21. Not shipping these because they’re both heavy and delicate. 

I’ve also been making polymer clay pins & earrings. I’m trying to raise some extra cash for a two week cross-country road trip at the end of September. 

Shoot an email to [email protected] or “ASK” here if you’d like a customized order, or want one of these here. There are many more in the works! Pacific coast beaches are an excellent source for aesthetic detritus.

[ab-moore-blog]

I made these drawings a week ago. They’re small 6x6″ india ink studies of abstract feelings that were triggered in the places loosely represented here from memory. Cell phone photos were helpful in triggering memories of these feelings and places- most of these photos were taken during two separate trips to Sutro Baths in San Francisco. 

The top image... a vague splash somewhere in the ocean distance, where a whale sighting was missed, while in the foreground ants strangely gather at an impression in the sand... the feeling that something special or repugnant is missing, or hidden from view. The bottom image, a representation of a specific memory from my last trip to Sutro Baths- sitting alone on a rock in the wind as the sun set, watching a solitary bird like a kite just hang in the air, completely immobile. It remained static for so long that I almost questioned its reality. In its impossible stillness, it seemed to speak to sadness. I was facing a rock, listening to the water wash in and roll out in echoed sighs from a dark crack in its center. I walked closer to hear the sound more clearly. When I turned, the bird was gone.

[ab-moore-blog]

During my first month living in Oakland, I started a small series of pen&ink drawings in my sketchbook. More like thoughts in a notebook, these sketches evolved from text exercises. I made a list of personally symbolic things- objects from memory, experience, and dream- in this case, “the Desert Radio” (top), “the Dying Fire” (middle), and “the Night Window” (bottom), and wrote about them. The text then served to clarify a feeling that a drawing alone can merely suggest. This exercise was helpful in processing some abstract feelings about yearning, loss, loneliness, and hope.

These drawings are more diaristic than most work that I publish online. It can be difficult for me to translate explicit feelings, so using photographs to trigger sense memories helps me to create personal work. I included a few cell phone pictures from my drive out west that I used to make these drawings.

[ab-moore-blog]

In May, I designed a shirt for my friends in the Baltimore-based post-gaze trio, Alter. I’m thankful to my friends for helping me continue a bi-coastal practice.

I combined tarot symbolism from one of my favorite cards, The Tower, with a Magritte spin on the Lovers. I reworked a previous winter’s depiction of the Tower as a faceless monolith into a flaming statue accompanied by symbols of time’s reliable warp.

They’re selling these shirts (and... coozies!) on their online store, alongside a very cool original design by Kristen Tata. 

The melty lil hourglass drawing made it into Heather’s skin last night : ~ )

[ab-moore-blog]

In March, I relocated from Baltimore, Maryland to Oakland, California. I have many updates from the studio to filter in now that I’m finally feeling settled in the Bay Area.

My friends in Baltimore supported me with this move with many tattoo exchanges in the weeks leading up to my drive out here. Here’s a few pages from my sketchbook from this winter in Baltimore.

[ab-moore-blog]

I also got this shout-out on MetalSucks.net... hehe!

[thevisualartofmetal]

Artwork by A.B. Moore Barbelith - Mirror Unveiled (2014) Post/Black Metal

[ab-moore-blog]

Artwork I did last year for Barbelith was featured on this metal art blog.

[ab-moore-blog]

Tonight at the Bell Foundry, Barbelith releases Mirror Unveiled on CD and cassette. We’ve been busy preparing the basement for the show- I painted this text on a wall a couple days ago.