Industrial landscape artist John Moore had never stepped foot on Upstate soil before Greenville County Museum of Art director Tom Styron approached him in a New York City art gallery last year about traveling here—so that he might inspire and be inspired. His resultant oil on canvas, a compilation of images from a week’s worth of travels up and down Buncombe Road, is entitled Sans Souci, and it promises to get local art critics conversing.

As Moore explored various neighborhoods on Greenville’s west side this past summer, he made lists of things that struck him as “visible evidence of things changing.” Water towers, smokestacks, railroad overpasses, ventilators, bridges, birds on wires, kudzu, storefront churches, graffiti, trains, and loading docks. “The texture of time is very beautiful,” Moore offers. “I would make some composition studies, then return to the sites the next day.”

Although the resulting portrait may appear factual, it is, in fact, only a composite. And it may not be what many locals identify with the Sans Souci neighborhood. Such is the beauty of an outsider’s view. “You would never find that exact site,” Moore explains. “It’s composed of things I thought were unique to the area and very specific. And it’s assembled in a way to give weight and presence to those things, even though they don’t all exist in relation to each other any place.”

When Moore, retired as chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s fine arts graduate program, returned home to Philadelphia, he was struck by the similarity of some images (like water towers) in his own city and how he’d never noticed them before. “Painting slows down the process of looking,” he explains. He spent several months creating Sans Souci from his studio in Maine (while listening to CDs of blues musician/civil rights activist Josh White, who hails from Greenville) and then placed the finishing touches on it back home in PA. “Sometimes you see something familiar but all of a sudden it’s unfamiliar. It looks fresh.”

Such is the goal of the Greenville County Museum of Art's twenty-five-years-and-running art commissioning program, which has brought dozens of artists—most, like Moore, from out of town—here so that they might use the city as a subject in their artwork.

The assemblage of that commissioning effort, which is called A Portrait of Greenville and includes Sans Souci, is on display at the art museum through September 26 and combines works by Southern artists (William McCullough), sculptors (John Ahearn), painters (watercolor artist Stephen Scott Young), and new works by Andrew Lenaghan and Moore. “We hope to motivate our own artists to make Greenville a primary theme in their work and reflect the character and charisma of our community to a larger audience,” Styron says.

The selection of images varies widely, from urban (downtown) to rural (Fountain Inn), modern to nostalgic, and historic (a series of drawings from the 1950s to 1980s by former Furman art department head Charles Blackwood) to contemporary. But all the artists share the common experience of, through the years, having been invited to Greenville with the charge of lending a fresh perspective on this place we call home.

Want to go?
What: A Portrait of Greenville, 25 years of commissioned pieces
Where: Greenville County Museum of Art, 420 College Street
Cost: Free, donations accepted

More Art
Check out more of John Moore’s work inspired by his time in Greenville. An exhibition of his drawings features a number of pieces related to his trip here. Visit www.locksgallery.com for some of those images.