Anna Leigh Moore’s artwork captures a part of the western landscape that’s too elusive for words. With watercolors and oils, she transmits a feeling onto the page—shared communion between the land and the observer. Her art conveys a profound appreciation for Utah’s landscapes, from the high alpine to the fiery desert. She started her journey toward becoming a professional artist as a child.
“The actual genesis was my grandmother in Pennsylvania,” Moore shares. “She was an artist. She taught my siblings and me in her studio how to paint. It was playful and fun. Art has always been a through line of my life because of her.”
Many people in Park City can relate to Moore’s story of westward migration and the common theme of coming on a whim for a season or two and never leaving. “I worked a million seasonal jobs…ski instructing, ski delivery, catering, nanny,” she recalls.
Despite the hustle of piecing together work to survive, she was moved by the landscape and inspired to continue creating art. “Among having all those jobs, I would always somehow find time to paint. Moving west, the landscape became my muse,” she describes. “These big horizons, vistas, distances, mountains, and deserts. Suddenly, it was all I wanted to paint.”
Moore attributes her experience as a seasonal employee to part of her success as a professional artist. “Never having a ‘real job’ made becoming an artist easier.”
Her trajectory as a Park City-based professional artist began in 2017 at the Park Silly Market, where she shared a booth with her partner, Garth Franklin. He is a carpenter (who now operates a successful business called Franklin Woodworking), and they sold their wares side-by-side. “Summer of 2017 was when we had our full artist vagabond summer doing Park Silly Market and living in a tent in my boss’ yard in Tollgate. I look back on it now and wonder, ‘How did we do that?’ It was so hard. But you have to start somewhere.”
Moore’s tenacity has transformed her passion into a sustainable vocation. “As long as you show up every day, treat it like a job, and give it that respect, being an artist is a very viable career,” she shares that the most essential component of longevity is perspective. “Making your art about something you care about, and not about what you think someone will buy, is the most important thing. Don’t have the audience in the back of your mind as you create, because it will immediately become inauthentic when it’s not true to you.”
Witnessing her work, it’s evident she treasures the landscapes she paints and draws. “In order to make the art, I have to take time off painting, to go and physically have these experiences in nature that then inform the artwork,” she shares. “All of my artwork is from personal experiences, real moments, real places that deserve to be immortalized.”
Her mission is to capture the duality she feels when immersed in nature. “These places have been around for billions of years; the human life cycle cannot even compute the eternity of the land, yet there will never be that same cloud again. You will never see that same sunset.” While she aims to capture the essence of deep time and fleeting moments of beauty, she is also driven to create by the local policies that can potentially alter the landscape indefinitely.
“In Utah, with our state motto, being ‘Industry’, these lands are eternally coming up for sale and development,” she feels. “There is an urgency to bear witness to these places, because they may not look like this, be like this. Extraction and development change the landscape. When you realize something may be lost, it becomes even more precious, poignant, and important. The core of making this art is that people realize what is at stake in our lifetime.”
One way Moore continues to ignite her flame for landscape art and share appreciation for the natural world is through instruction. “To teach allows me to continue the legacy that my grandma taught me. Art is fun. It doesn’t have to be scary. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
