Up to scratch!
1930 - 2013
Austin Moseley was born in Staffordshire in 1930. He qualified as a Chartered Mechanical Engineer and worked in industry for some years. He then went on to become senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton until his retirement. Living and working in the West Midlands, Austin Moseley painted for many years and exhibited widely including the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (of which he was elected a Member) and the Royal Institute of Painters in Oil.
Austin Moseley’s craggy, textured oil paintings - whether of Midland canal scenes or hill sides in the Dales and Lakes - portray the people, animals and landscape around him with humorous affection. The thick, impasto paint is applied entirely with a palette knife which lightly abstracts the subjects of his pictures, whether they are judging a local vegetable show, gossiping, or walking the dog past a grimy urban panorama. The jagged, dark and angular shapes of the rocks or buildings contrast with the diffused light of the sky or water to contribute to an atmospheric evocation of people living in small communities.
There is an old Black country saying, when commenting on the weather, which says: “it’s looking black over Bill’s mother’s”, implying that rain is approaching. I am sometimes asked, by some kindly person, when looking at some painting of mine, “oh, where is that?” I have to judge how flippant I can afford to be before replying, but if it seems to be appropriate I might say -”well, it’s the back of Bill’s mother’s”. The reality is that most of my paintings are not intended to be accurately topographical – certainly not any which may have a passing reference to the Black Country area. A great deal of what I knew in earlier years has disappeared, but some hints of that may appear in some of my work, and bits of the old features do still exist, especially around the canals. AM
The wonderful paintings of Austin Moseley are in collections worldwide. He exhibited with us for almost 20 years and very sadly died in October 2013. We miss him.
