Industrial landscape paintings by John Moore executed over the last three decades focus on sites from Conneaut, Ohio, to Waterville, Maine, including Coatesville, Pennsylvania, a locale that
has inspired such American Modernists as Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford. Moore has revisited places in Coatesville and throughout the rustbelt that he painted twenty years ago, and his
most recent paintings depict changes that have occurred there since. One of his subjects, Paradise, Pennsylvania, 13 miles west of Coatesville, is Amish farmland, a place that is the rural
antithesis of industrial life in America.
Moore is often described as one of the one of the leading realist painters of his generation, and many of his paintings resemble places where he grew up. While the images appear immediately
recognizable, the paintings are, in fact, partial composites, based on specific sites but also incorporating formal concerns and oral history as told by individuals with ties to the
regions.
The Thirteen Miles from Paradise catalogue is drawn from the exhibition of the same name at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania, where Moore has been Gutman
Professor of Fine Arts and chair of the Department of Fine Arts since 1999. The catalogue includes contributions by David Cohen, art critic for the New York Sun, publisher and editor
of the online magazine artcritical.com, and gallery director at the New York Studio School; and by Alexi Worth, a senior critic in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of
Pennsylvania.
