After attending the Slade School of Art in London from 1928-31, Moynihan started a pioneering movement in painting called Objective Abstraction, a precursor of Abstract Expressionism, concerned with the medium itself and emphasizing painterly strokes. During the war, Moynihan was recruited as an official war artist through the support of Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery in London. This established Moynihan as the premier portrait painter in the United Kingdom and led to his appointment as the head of painting at the Royal College of Art soon after the war. Under his auspices, the Royal College became the hub of the British art world, as Francis Bacon occupied Moynihan's studio, and Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, and David Hockney were students. Always restless and never comfortable being pigeonholed, Moynihan would oscillate between abstraction and figuration with a distinct fluidity as Gerhard Richter and others would later do.
In the early 1970s, he began making a series of still lifes comprised of tools of a painter's trade haphazardly strewn on tables and shelves. Of these works the artist said: "It was especially important to me not to arrange the still life so as to form a pictorial grouping-a picture. I wanted the objects to be found…so that the dictionary words of describing an object disappear. I wanted to paint them because they looked like that-without my intervention-having arranged themselves like that in that particular light." His main focuses in the 1970s and 1980s were self-portraits and studio still-lives that are innovative and astoundingly fluid, hinting at the artist’s admiration for Chinese landscape painting in the gentle whips of translucent paint.
Rodrigo Moynihan's work is in the collections of the Tate, London; Royal Academy of Arts Collection, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., among others.
