MALCOLM CAMPBELL MORAN

My Story

I was born in 1948 into a prosperous family from New Orleans, Louisiana. My father and mother loved and cared for me along with my two brothers. Like lots of people of their generation, at the end of WWII, my parents lived large and fast and focused. They did not always have time to hyper-focus on their kids, but neither did they forget or neglect us. In fact, they were adventuresome, and worldly, and curious people who included their sons in many adventures, introduced us to many interesting situations and characters, many of whom show up in my work to this day.

After earning a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the South, I dropped what was destined to be a rather traditional path toward a business career, to pursue a childhood dream to “make” something tangible with my hands - call it art or design or engineering, I was determined to go to an art or design university for a second degree. I was accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated with a degee in painting. I was through with business, or so I thought.

Print

In the 1980’s my father passed away and left me with a complicated financial albatros, that included a sizable but struggling printing company. I returned back South to ”deal”with this after my infant six year painting career throttled to a slower speed To this point my efforts had been directed exclusively toward painting and exhibiting my work.

My family’s printing business, founded in 1881 as a stationary engraver and office supplier grew over four generations to become a large regional offset printer with 400 people operating on a highly technical digital platform. From four generations of printers, many of my lineage were talented merchants, focused on the bottom line, but there were a few of us who were born euphemistically speaking with “ink under their fingernails" - nostalgicly unforgetful for such memories as the esthetics of type fonts to the smell of molten lead used to cast letterpress type. But the writing was on the wall. It was not going to be easy to make a profit from ink on paper. At this point I purchased the busiess from my family and embarked on a fast path toward a purely digital platform. The very short story is: I suuceeded at the task, but it took 18 years and a need to congure an computer engineer in myself that I was aware even existed.

In 1998, I sold the enterprise and returned full time to my painting career. I had been able to continue painting at throttled-back pace throughout my buisiness life, but was eager to get to it full time. In the early 2000’s I was trying out new art forms including printmaking. It was not lost on me the irony of strugling with a hand held press not significantly different than Guttenberg’s wooden contraption, when I had just sold a business with scores of the most sophisticated print gadgets anywhere, but I was back with the smell of ink and solvents and they were on my hands and not someone elses hands. It felt like a homecoming of sort, a melding of disparate worlds in to one. The shoe fit.

In 1998, I sold the enterprise and returned full time to my painting career. I had been able to continue painting at throttled-back pace throughout my buisiness life, but was eager to get to it full time. In the early 2000’s I was trying out new art forms including printmaking. It was not lost on me the irony of strugling with a hand held press not significantly different than Guttenberg’s wooden contraption, when I had just sold a business with scores of the most sophisticated print gadgets anywhere, but I was back with the smell of ink and solvents and they were on my hands and not someone elses hands. It felt like a homecoming of sort, a melding of disparate worlds in to one. The shoe fit.

Monoprints were the form to which I was most attracted. I could paint directly on a plate, pull a print, and if displeased, work the print as a painting on paper. It was a very fluid medium and suited me well. I have moved more and more from only working in this manner, to utilizing the same freeform process with oil on canvas.

So thats it. That’s what I do and how I arrived here. If you are interested in my work, please drop me an email at this address: info@malcolmmoranstudio.com

• Location: Greenwich, CT, USA
• Email: hello@ivandesignostrom.com
• Résumé: resume.pdf
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ivandesignostrom