By Tom Tracy
Melinda Moore arrived at a monthly roundtable of photo artists in West Palm Beach and pulled from a shoulder bag four or five new travel-photo scenic prints she had quickly matted that afternoon.
They were rich, gallery-quality black-and-whites of London street life, but no biggie: Moore — who comes across as everyone’s favorite aunt who has been around the world more times than anyone else you know — had worked up the prints overnight as a show-and-tell for the Palm Beach Photographic Center’s InFocus study group in June.
Most of the Florida native’s body of photographic digital art concerns itself with the natural world, and predominantly birds. While there are plenty of people photographing wildlife and turning those images into gallery-grade digital art or photo “paintings,” not many people are producing gallery-grade painting.
The Palm Beach Gardens City Hall is showcasing some 50 of Moore’s pieces this summer as part of its GardensArt program. Creative Focus: Photography and Digital Art by Melinda Moore opened June 27 and runs through Aug. 25 in the City Hall lobby. The exhibit features Florida birds and landscapes, jungle cats and elephants, both in straight photographic renderings and through Moore’s texture montage and digital painting composites.
Last month, Moore took Best of Show (first place) at the 15th Annual InFocus juried exhibition of the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in West Palm Beach, which included a $950 cash prize. Moore’s Friends Forever, an image of two elephants embracing each other’s trunks, beat out entries from around the country and beyond. The juror was Atlanta-based commercial photographer Kevin Ames.
Growing up in and around the Everglades, Moore said nature has been her principal art teacher. After her parents settled in the Lake Ida area of western Delray Beach in the 1950s, her father designed and built some of the early housing that still surrounds the lake today. At home, Moore and her mother kept a journal of the birds and wildlife they encountered there. She kept that up for two decades in Europe, where she lived for almost two decades and raised a daughter.
(Photo by Tom Tracy)
Her interest in photography started as a child with her friend Julie, who had a Brownie camera and a Super 8 film camera. In her adulthood, Moore found a piece of untouched Everglades at Grassy Waters Nature Preserve and started volunteering there to reconnect with a lifelong passion for photography.
“I think it has to do with the light, weather and atmosphere and watching the animals and birds,” Moore said. “I loved (James John) Audubon and his artwork when I was young, and I felt very protective of and engaged in the Everglades – pretty much with the snakes and the alligators at the back door.”
While perhaps not an expert birdwatcher per se, Moore knows her way around birds and she said she is still learning some of the species. In Florida, birds – especially the white egret varieties, warblers and other small birds – are her favorite artistic subject. Her favorite places for photographing birds include the Green Cay Nature and Grassy Waters Preserves in Boynton Beach, the Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Delray Beach, and Merritt Island near Cape Canaveral.
“Things come along that are supposed to happen to you and it just works out that my camera likes birds. I could take a picture of a flower but it won’t be as good as a bird. I realize I enjoy subjects with soul. And I would like to do more (people) portraiture in the future.”
Another good place for birding is Clyde Butcher’s front yard on Florida’s southwest coast. Butcher is the renowned South Florida-based Everglades wildlife photographer in the Ansel Adams style. “I went there this year and saw every kind of bird you can imagine in the canal in the front yard,” she said.
Any place is fair game for finding birds, including aviaries, zoos and in the wild, from Florida to Canada and beyond. If she doesn’t like the bird’s environment, she changes it out or alters it with her digital texturing process, which she calls “morphography.”
Textures are digital images of colors, shapes, billows of light rays or sprays of water, scanned materials and papers, sometimes warped with digital brushes and cloning techniques, then blended underneath or around the principal photograph.
Use of textures has also given a unifying theme to Moore’s output, which is printed on fine archival papers, canvas and sometimes ceramic tiles. She prefers to print at M & M Studios Framing in Jupiter.
“I wanted to do a body of work,” Moore said. “With the whole textured feel to the birds – that can stand as a group and can blend together. You can change the tonal quality of the subject itself with the textures, and so that creates a series of a similar tone. It is a whole learning and experimenting thing and seeing what texture goes with what.”
Moore started her professional career early when she walked into Bethesda Memorial Hospital at the age of 16 and became a volunteer. She studied nursing at Florida State University, then later taking nursing positions at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Midlife burnout set in after heavy hospital work as a charge nurse, and she returned to Florida with the idea of living on a boat and sailing, which she did.
For a number of years Moore earned a living through boat rebuilding, chartering and brokering. Later, her parents moved to southern Spain on the advice of her father’s doctor who prescribed the Andalusian climate as a remedy for his severe allergies. She and their daughter joined them, and Moore opened a property management and real estate company during Spain’s 20- or 30-year land and development boom, which only abated recently.
In Spain, Moore learned the art of flower arranging and art appreciation through nine years of association with a Japanese cultural and healing society in Spain, and she traveled extensively throughout the Continent. In the rural life of Spain and elsewhere she soaked up a generous array of musical and artistic expression that was nurtured at the village level and the big cities. The Tate Museum in London and the Prado in Madrid were personal favorites, as well as a vast, little-known art world that she stumbled on in the former Yugoslavia before the country’s breakup in the civil wars of the early 1990s.
“Some of the most amazing places for artwork were Montenegro and Yugoslavia,” she said. “There was a treasure trove of artwork that was totally untouched and in strange little museums and strange little places: paintings cared for by monks on mountain tops from the periods of Titian and Rubens. People there were very into art and culture, and the artists were revered.”
Moore returned to Florida in 2001 and now lives with her husband Bill Dacamara, a computer program designer, in Palm Beach Gardens. Her daughter, Danielle Lucas, is a graphic artist living in Europe.
She returned to an active life as a photographic artist through Flickr, the online photography-sharing and educational community where photo artists from around the world congregate in various special-interest subgroups. From there, she sought out local artists’ associations online.
After winning some national recognition, Moore was invited to be featured artist at M & M Studios and Lighthouse Art Gallery in Jupiter. She is active in Photo Salon at the Armory Arts Center, the Boca Museum Artist’s Guild, the Audubon Society and many other groups. Currently, she has three pieces in the Amory’s In and Out of Focus exhibit, and this summer’s InFocus exhibit at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre.
“I saw her work in a website called Artists of Palm Beach County,” said Amy Stepper, director of GardensArt and a recreation supervisor for the city of Palm Beach Gardens. Stepper invited Moore to be the featured summer exhibit at City Hall, and on Friday, some 50 children from the Gardens Camp summer program will spend a day with Moore and her exhibit.
“Since it was summer, I was trying to find something that would appeal to all ages,” Stepper said, noting that Moore photographs things sometimes in our own backyards that we don’t always notice. “She has techniques of bringing things out in nature that we take for granted. It creates almost a painterly look and although it is photography, it sometimes blurs the lines.”
Janet Heaton, a local painter and gallery owner who sits on the board for the Friends of John D. MacArthur Beach State Park on Singer Island, met Moore at an arts supply store, and became an admirer of her work.
“I like the translucent quality, the use of colors, the use of light that is like glass or the water,” Heaton said.
The two kept in touch and Heaton invited her to do an exhibit at the park earlier this year. Heaton said she is impressed with Moore’s talent but also her work ethic: She knows how to stay on top of things and handle the follow-through — a quality not always present in the arts community.
“She has an eye for objects. She doesn’t just shoot a bird or animal; she captures it in very good light and good composition,” Heaton said. “I have worked with many artists and had a gallery for many years and represented some of the finest wildlife artists from the United States and Africa, and Melinda is on top of things. A lot of artists don’t think that is important, but if you are being represented in a gallery that is important.”
Creating the artwork, Moore said, is the fun part, while getting it into production and framed can be the most difficult stage of preparing to show work. A portion of the Creative Focus show will benefit GardensArt and the Audubon Society of the Everglades.
“I have been very blessed in this life with the freedom to travel and enjoy other cultures, which I feel is a big influence on my current work,” Moore said. “Those memories and experience inspire me.”
Creative Focus can be seen from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday in the lobby of the Palm Beach Gardens City Hall, 10500 N. Military Trail, through Aug. 25. For more information, visit www.photoartbymelinda.com or call (561) 630-1116.