Megan Moore (she/her)
Skills/Mediums: Drawing, Illustration-Graphic Design, Painting
Member of ACW since: July 17, 2025
Biography
My paintings are accessible, calming, and meditative. Themes of inner peace and sanctuary recur in my compositions as I use my canvas to frame small vignettes of the natural world. My paintings are ready to engage the willing viewer in contemplation and reflection. I am inspired by natural forms, creating personal symbolism, and employing my own version of magic realism—elevating realistic subject matter by use of idealized and dreamy arrangement. I create balanced compositions with instinctive, but careful, use of color. My background in illustration and graphic design is sometimes seen in the use of narrative elements. I primarily use oil paints, but also use watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and drawing materials in developing concepts. Mural projects over the past five years have led to my use of latex acrylic in studio work.
The life changing events of 2020—the global pandemic and the local murder of George Floyd and the subsequent civil uprising—were a catalyst for changing my approach as an artist from that of a craftsman to that of a co-creator, community engager, and meaning-maker. The pressures of 2020 caused enough of a shift in my perspective of life that I reoriented my understanding of values, emotions and connections in relation to my work. That fall, I completed a mural project that clarified my participation in public art as an opportunity to support community healing and a way for neighborhoods to express their shared values. A second project, a series of paintings commissioned for a new office space, and the conversations I had around the project, clarified the value of my art in supporting holistic individual wellness. My work is displayed in many health care settings, and the attributes that make it appropriate for those spaces are also supportive to individuals in other spaces, including workplaces and homes, as well as to individuals that see my public art. I am now less focused on my art as a final product and more interested in the experience of art, both in creation and sharing.
In 2021, I was invited by the Lake Street Council to be part of an artist panel to discuss the potential and power of including the arts as a central aspect of redeveloping the Lake Street corridor after the effects of the civil uprising. I have continued to work with the Lake Street Council on public art and have been an active member of my neighborhood artists’ group, LoLa (The League of Longfellow Artists). Through two residencies with local organizations, which both included working in public space, I have learned the importance of artists as a community within ourselves. This encouraged me to give my first workshops in the past year, using painting as a tool to facilitate accessing individual creativity. Sharing not only finished work but also the creative process, with its experience of a flow state of mind, has become important to my work.