Man discovers art can be force for positive change
By Kevin Grasha
Lansing State Journal
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — When he was 20, Josh Moore was directionless.
He’d dropped out of Lansing Community College. He was selling marijuana, so he could pay for what he was smoking.
Among his friends was a teen who ended up being shot multiple times on an elementary school playground during a drug deal. The friend survived, but a few years later was convicted of armed robbery and is now serving 20 to 35 years in prison.
“It was a dark time for me,” Moore, now 29, recalled to the Lansing State Journal. “I was going down the wrong road. It was at a point where it was either going to get worse — or I was going to stop and get better.”
He began to turn his life around in 2005, he said, after being arrested for marijuana possession and now is a full-time artist and apprentice for internationally recognized Grand Rapids-based artist Paul Collins.
They recently collaborated on an 8-by-8-foot mural featuring Martin Luther King Jr. that they plan to install in a new exhibition center in a Chicago neighborhood, where the civil rights leader once lived.
Collins, who in 2006 was honored by the U.S. House of Representatives, said he and Moore will collaborate on a second mural that will feature King on one side, President Barack Obama on the other, and the Statue of Liberty in the center.
“Josh is not only going to be an outstanding artist, but an outstanding man for the community,” Collins said.
Moore, he said, has come to realize that art can be a force for positive change.
“Art is one of the few things that can bring people together,” Collins said. “That’s what he is doing.”
Moore, who works in his bedroom in the mobile home north of Lansing that he shares with his parents, is working on a series of paintings about the “best in humanity.”
It will feature regular people — an immigrant couple working in a community garden, a street musician — doing positive things. Good for the sake of doing good, he said.
The oil-on-canvas paintings are realist works. Moore said he is inspired by the old master painters as well as American artists like Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth.
It was Collins, however, who inspired Moore in other ways.
“He really showed me that I can do good things with my paintings — not just show something that’s aesthetically beautiful,” Moore said, “but that I can really tell a story and make a positive impact on the world.”
Moore’s turnaround began in January 2005, when police pulled over the car he was driving on a local highway. In his pocket was a sandwich bag full of marijuana.
He was arrested and jailed for a night until he posted bond. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor possession charge, and in January 2006, he went before Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who then was on the 55th District Court in Mason, to be sentenced.
Aquilina sentenced him to probation, a sentence Moore, then 21, said may have changed his life.
As part of the probation, Moore was tested for drugs regularly. And if he violated any of the conditions, he would have gone to jail.
Moore said he hasn’t smoked marijuana or used any drugs since his arrest.
He successfully completed his probation in about four months, and the drug conviction has disappeared from his record.
Earlier this year, Moore sent Aquilina a letter, saying that, for him, the sentence worked and persuaded him to find a more-productive path in life. The letter mentioned his work with Collins.
In an interview, Aquilina, now an Ingham County circuit court judge, said Moore’s letter “knocked my breath away.”
“It felt like I was at my own child’s graduation,” she said. “It was such a tribute — not just to him, but all of the people that I have put on probation, that he has succeeded on such a great level.”
Moore’s career as an artist is only just beginning. He’s self-taught and has been painting for only about four or five years.
Before he picked up a paint brush, his artistic experience was limited to comic book characters he drew in school and some graffiti he painted on underpasses.
When Moore tries to describe why and how he started painting, he makes it seem like painting chose him.
“It was just — I’m going to try this out today, this is what I’m going to spend my time doing,” he said. “The first painting looked good, so I did another one. It just built upon itself, grew and grew. I just kept my head down and kept painting. Ignored the rest of the world for a while.”
Moore paints at least seven or eight hours a day, seven days a week. The easel he built himself with two-by-fours from Home Depot stands only a few feet from his bed.
Completed portraits line the walls of his small bedroom, as well as a photograph of him and Collins standing next to their mural featuring Martin Luther King Jr. and protesters holding peace signs from the windows of a building.
Moore met Collins a few years ago. Moore had sent a letter, trying to get his work shown at Collins’ gallery in downtown Grand Rapids, which he runs with his wife.
“I was just struck by the fact that he was a humanist,” Collins said. “He was on the same track I was.”
Collins said Moore initially wasn’t sure about his own work because it wasn’t “following art for the sake of art.”
“I told him: ‘Your art is going to be special, because it relates specifically to people. You don’t care about what museums think,’ “ Collins said.
Moore said his life has “done a full circle.”
“I fully believe in rehabilitation,” he said. “A person can change the second they make up their mind to do it.”
