Immensely talented local portrait artist Logan Moffat is undaunted by the postponement of his exhibition ‘The Mind is the Portrait’ due to the COVID-19 outbreak. He sees it merely as a reason to continue working on his portraits and to evolve what he knows as consciousness painting.
A former student at ACG Strathallan, a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts, with a BFA Honours, Moffat is also the youngest winner ever of the Adam Portraiture Award. An award he won with the painting ‘Elam’ in 2018. Despite his glowing track record, Moffat sees his work as a chance to connect with people, seeing every painting as an embodiment of anyone at the time it was created.
“The paintings are a self-reaction to the environment I inhabit, in the ‘real’ world and the digitally created ‘idealised’ one. Through the constant absorption my consciousness is continuously evolving. Therefore I present my paintings, not as a finished body but as an evolution of each other. The painting is not finished, until I’m dead…. It still may not be finished then.”
Having painted since primary school, it was his time at ACG Strathallan that awakened his true creativity and led him to his love of oil and the versatility of it as a medium for portrait work. He also works in watercolours, but it is the flexibility of oil and the ability to get a lifelike depth of colour that appeals to Moffat.
“Working in oil gives me opportunities to constantly work on my paintings for a long time, I may be working on a commission, go out for a run up Puke Hill and come back to my studio and be able to alter it to reflect what I see in a different light.”
The exhibition at the Franklin Steel Gallery was to have run starting in May but will now be postponed until at least the end of June. It encompasses a retrospective look based on his work from the last seven years that have included solo exhibitions, ‘The Homeless – 2015’ “The Studio” (2018) and in group exhibitions most recently at the Moonlight Gallery and The Artist Room – Dunedin.
He has also participated in and exhibited in China as part of an artist exchange in September last year.
He spent a month in China and recognises it was an incredible highlight, one that after recent events he values even more. He exhibited as part of an exchange with the AI Gallery that encourages east-west cultural exchange. He collaborated with local artists on a number of works in a studio setting learning many new techniques and appreciations of old ways.
“The ability to communicate with others in ways other than language is a wonderful opportunity. As people we all communicate in so many different ways and art is a medium for being able to transcend cultural, age, gender boundaries and create greater understanding.”
With influences such as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, Moffat is looking forward to continuing his journey as an artist, from his own home studio where he is in demand for private commissions and other projects and it isn’t hard to see why.
His dream is to be able to create a space that allows art to be shared in a much greater capacity, where everyone is an exhibitor in an exhibition, with the use of workshops and a guest art wall. Encouraging creativity that everyone can work with and on and be a constant turntable for creation of ideas ultimately leading to a community of communication through art.