LLOYD MOYLAN (1893-1963) untitled New Mexico landscape with wild horses in an arroyo with stream, oil on board 12”x14”, signed Lloyd Moylan lower left, ca. 1932.
Lloyd Moylan, originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Art Student’s League in New York, 1917-19, and later, beginning in 1922, at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs. He taught at the Broadmoor Art Academy from 1929 to 1931, He made numerous painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico during his years in Colorado Springs, and finally moved permanently to New Mexico, where he painted Indian genre and mural art and ultimately became the Curator of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe, the predecessor to today’s famed Wheelwright Museum.
Moylan is well known for the large murals of indian subject matter which he created in the Cheyenne School and Ute theatre, Colorado Springs, stimulated in part by his trips to Mexico and exposure to the burgeoning mural movement there. Later, and under the sponsorship of the WPA, Moylan executed a large mural spanning two floors in the administration building of Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a 2,000 square foot mural in the McKinley County courthouse in Gallup, New Mexico, as well as murals at eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico., and in the Hilton Hotel, Albuquerque. Exhibited: Art Institute of Chicago, Broadmoor Art Academy, University of Colorado Museum. Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, Penrose Public Library, Colorado Springs, University of New Mexico Museum, Albuquerque, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and many New Mexico and Colorado Springs private collections. Moylan died in Gallup, where he taught art at the Gallup High School.
Stylistically, Moylan was a regionalist modernist, and work from his prime period in the 1930’s had a strong art deco flavor with simplified line and muscular composition, very much in tune with the social realism and WPA aesthetic of the period. The present example is notable for its heavily impastoed brushwork and tactile surface.