Scottsdale’s annual Arizona Fine Art Expo provides the experience of a juried art festival, the exhibits of a gallery and the intimacy of an artist’s studio all rolled into one dynamic event. This year’s expo will run through March 27 and features 124 artists sharing their inspiration and process with attendees.
Monte Moore, a multidisciplinary artist who splits his time between Scottsdale and Denver, will be presenting and creating art at the event. Though he’s well-known at the expo for his hyper-realistic western paintings, he has an extensive background in graphic design and pop culture illustration.
After graduating from Colorado State University in 1993, he immediately started freelancing as a comic book cover artist. That eventually led to a successful career making art for comics, games and movies including iconic companies such as Lucasfilm, DC Comics and Marvel. In fact, he didn’t start delving into fine western art until 2018.
Moore is the exclusive artist for the Mandalorian Collection at Thomas Kinkade Studios, where he creates a painting from an iconic scene from each episode of The Mandalorian on Disney+. The collaboration started at ComicCon in San Diego before The Mandalorian was even on anyone’s radar, Moore says. “I had seen there was a new licensee that had licenses for Marvel and Star Wars and DC Comics, not really knowing that it was Thomas Kinkade Studios, easily one of the most well-known art names and brands of the modern art era,” he explains. He was finishing up his first piece for the collection when the show debuted and took the internet by storm. A “long-time Star Wars fan,” Moore was ecstatic.
“One of the things that was unique was the folks in charge of branding and marketing decided that I would be the first artist who gets to sign and promote their work individually,” he says. “A lot of times when you work with the bigger companies, you don’t get to sign your work or get credited because it’s just advertising work.” Because of his place within the industry and the fanbase that he had accrued over the course of the past three decades, he would have the remarkable honor of having his name on the front of each print and the back of each certificate of authenticity as well as ancillary licensed products like puzzles available at big box retailers like Walmart and Target.
“You would think being in the mass market wouldn’t be what an artist wants. We’re in a fine art show and people think of galleries and things like that, but honestly very few artists have their work available to hundreds of millions of people,” he says. “To be able to go into chains and see your work or on Amazon and have it say on the back of the box, ‘Art by Monte Moore’ is quite a big deal because it really helps your visibility within the industry, to have that feather in the cap.”
Though he’s creating commercial art products, each painting is done using traditional techniques. “A lot of the illustration industry has gone digital and they’re not doing any drawings and paintings,” he explains. “Everything I do for Thomas Kinkade is done by hand traditionally with paint.”
Because the studio has high-resolution scans of his art, Moore also has the unique opportunity to sell each original painting to the public. “If they want to spend between $15,000 and $20,000, they can go on the Thomas Kinkade Studios website and own a piece of Mandalorian history,” he says. “It’s probably the only licensed Star Wars art that you can buy because so little of it ends up available to the public.”
Moore’s versatility is vital to his success. “I’m kind of a rarity,” he says. “I like to do everything.” While many artists at the expo focus solely on bronze horse sculptures or watercolor landscapes, Moore is a self-proclaimed jack of all trades.
“That probably comes from being an illustrator – you need to be able to answer to whatever your client needed, a drawing, a painting, an illustration, airbrush, oil, watercolor,” he says. He frequently takes workshops from other art pros to continue honing his skills.
Moore grew up on a 30,000-acre cattle ranch. “My dad’s a cowboy and my mom did fine art as a hobby,” he says. “Me combining both the art and the western makes sense coming from both of my parents.” In addition to western scenes, he also paints fan art from popular western films like Tombstone and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He believes this gives people a chance to further connect with his creations. “By having art with those characters, it’s like having art of a friend you feel like you know.”
In addition to art, Moore is also a cinephile who has written screenplays and even produced several movies. Though both painting and producing films are creative outlets for Moore, he says making movies gives him more range to express his ideas. “A painting is usually a snapshot of a single moment,” he explains. “With a movie, you get to have dozens of scenes and characters and nuances, so you get to do the whole tapestry of a story.”
Since the start of the pandemic, he has been creating and publishing graphic novels. Currently, he writes four per year and hires comic book artists to do the interior art. “You’re able to tell it in a visual medium so people get to see the story rather than just reading it on the page,” he says. His goal is to use each novel as a marketing tool to ultimately turn them into a live action TV series. All of the publishing and printing for his novels is done in the East Valley.
Moore went to grade school in the Phoenix area and left when his father bought the cattle ranch in Colorado. “When I started doing expo, I fell back in love with the desert because I’d been gone for 40 years,” he says. “A couple things I love about the Phoenix area are you can almost always see mountains around you, and I love how the vegetation and the cactus and the desert is really throughout the city.” Like many artists, he’s inspired by Arizona sunsets. “It makes you want to paint them.”
Moore is also an avid motorcyclist and has hand-painted several of his bikes. “When you’re putting on all your gear and you go for a ride, it almost kind of feels like you’re a knight going into battle putting on their armor,” he says. “I have painted three or four of my motorcycles. It’s a way to customize your vehicle in a cool way.”
Fans can watch Moore at work on both his western and pop culture art at the Arizona Fine Art Expo. He touts the vent for its experiential nature. “You can have a conversation with an artist about their technique and watch a sculptor at work or glassblowing or a jeweler, or a painter such as myself. You get to see stuff that you normally don’t,” he says. “At a convention, I might draw but I’m certainly not going to be airbrushing or sculpting. That’s the thing that makes it so unique is seeing the artists working. Your booth is your studio.”
