The animal portraiture of Dana Moore
During Toe River Arts’ November Studio Tours, painter Carmen Grier was wrapping purchases of her work for a group of Charlotte visitors when one of them spotted a business card on Grier’s work table. She asked about the card, which featured an oil portrait of a white terrier.
“That’s Dana Moore,” Grier said. “She specializes in animal portraiture.”
Moore has long been a fixture in the local art community, though most people know her as the former program director at Penland School of Craft. Having first been invited to teach a photography course at Penland in 1993, Moore remained at the school until her retirement in 2013.
Since then, she has devoted herself to being a studio artist and animal advocate. Until recently, however, her portraits of animals were mostly unknown in the region’s art world, for Moore was primarily interested in painting for herself. However, that has quickly changed.
A Kalamazoo, Michigan, native, Moore began college as a music major at Michigan State University. But due to the early hour for music classes, the once late-sleeping Moore switched majors to film theory. She ultimately graduated from the University of Florida with an master of fine arts degree in photography.
At Florida, Moore assisted the renowned photographer Jerry Uelsmann, who created surrealistic, monochromatic images through composite photomontage. Constructing new narratives with images would inform Moore’s early work, although her family also played a role.
“My grandmother worked with clay,” Moore said. “She had a reproduction of Millet’s painting “The Gleaners” over her fireplace, which bothered her. She said, ‘I’m so tired of these ladies working in the hot sun!’ So, she took the painting to her workshop and used ceramic paints to add shade trees and pitchers of iced tea for the women.”
While employed at Penland, Moore could take classes there and concentrated on painting. Simultaneously, she was using her skills as a photographer toward a cause: Joining the board of Mitchell County Animal Rescue, Moore began photographing the animals in the shelter, which were published to promote their adoption.
It was her isolation during COVID that prompted Moore to begin painting animals as subjects, utilizing her photography to first create studies. Using multiple photographs of the shelter animals to capture a greater sense of their natures, she began painting their portraits.
Soon, the same process was used for friends’ animals, and, rapidly, word of mouth became advertising for Moore.
“I always want to make people look at animals with empathy and kindness,” Moore said. “To see them for the personalities that they are.”
Through a Penland friend, Amy Huseby — a professor of literature at Rice University in Houston — contacted Moore about painting her cats. Huseby praised the process of working with Moore, saying that she “was willing to make even tiny adjustments to capture more depth and aliveness. The completed paintings are a treasure for our family.”
Moore may also be hearing from the Charlotte visitors to Grier’s studio, who hastily jotted down the information from her business card.