Everyone has looked at the moon.

I have looked at it five times the way a painter looks — which is to say, with the specific intention of understanding what it actually is, rather than what I assumed I already knew about it.

The five paintings I have made of the moon hang together as a series I call Moon Moods. They will be exhibited at the Kore Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky in early 2027 as part of my first personal show.

But I want to tell you about them now, because together they demonstrate something I try to teach every student — something that is easier to show than to explain.

The five paintings share almost nothing in color, atmosphere, time of night, emotional register, or compositional approach.

In one — The Beauty of Our Sister World — the moon watches over an imagined rocky coastline from a pale daylit sky. Serene, distant, present. I painted it entirely from imagination, with a twenty-minute pencil sketch and twenty hours on canvas.

In another — which I think of as The Hidden Moon — the moon is barely visible at the horizon between canyon walls, almost swallowed by the warm glow of fading day. You have to look for it. I painted it this way deliberately. Sometimes the most significant things are the ones we nearly miss.

The third — Storm Moon — shows a full moon pushing through roiling storm clouds, surrounded by a golden halo, with a bare winter tree silhouetted in the lower left. The technical challenge was painting luminosity against an already-light background. The solution is not to paint the moon brighter — it is to deepen the surrounding sky just enough that the contrast does the work.

The fourth — Tropical Moon — spills its light across warm water in a long shimmering path straight toward the viewer. Palm silhouettes, amber horizon, dark trees against the night sky. This is the moon everyone has seen on a warm night near water and carried with them since.

And the fifth — Blood Moon — rises red-orange over dark mountains, its reflection burning in still water below. The moon of power and ancient fear. Nearly the entire canvas is dark. The moon and its reflection are the only real color.

Five moons. Five entirely different paintings. Five emotional worlds that share almost nothing except the subject that gave them their name.

This is what I mean when I say that painting is the act of truly seeing — not recording what is there, but discovering what is really there when you look without assumption.

The moon has no mood of its own. It is the painter who brings the mood.

And in bringing it, reveals something true about the particular moment of looking.

My course begins July 25, 2026. If you are ready to learn to see the way a painter sees — visit gordensoilpainting.com.

Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Oil Painter·Landscape Painting Instructor·Ear Surgeon (Retired)

Kore Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky

gordensoilpainting.com·[email protected]