On first meeting Randy Klinger it quickly becomes apparent that he’s an unconventional gallery director. His description of how the Moray Art Centre came about is not one of funding applications and feasibility studies.
The project started when Klinger and his wife Catherine left his hometown of New York after a “little voice” told him that he should visit Findhorn, a village in north-east Scotland.
The voice returned in 1997 while he was making his way home through London’s Covent Garden after a long day spent trying to secure UK citizenship.
“We were watching these African dancers in the square and this voice came back and said: ‘Now that you can stay, build this centre that will be the birthplace of the next golden age to address the aesthetic orgasm.’”
From this unconventional beginning, the Moray Art Centre was born. Armed with a mission, Klinger set about spreading the word about the aesthetic orgasm, by which he means having a physical, visceral response to art and beauty rather than an intellectual response. His approach to fundraising for a place to achieve this was similarly unusual.
“Before I knew it, more than 400 people had given me a quarter of a million pounds,” says Klinger. “This was quite a disturbing period of my life as I had signed an agreement to build a £1m centre and had no idea where the rest of this money was going to come from because the first quarter of a million came like a dream, in a very magical way – I never asked for a penny.”
But he did raise the rest of the money and even the building contractor contributed £10,000 to the project. The resulting gallery, which is 100% carbon neutral, opened in 2007 in Findhorn, Moray.
An ambitious programme
However, creating the building was only the start for Klinger, as the exhibition programme he and his colleagues are delivering is just as ambitious. The aim is to provide high-quality shows of historical and contemporary art.
The museum has four members of staff but holds a remarkable 12 exhibitions a year. Its first major exhibition opened in May 2008 and featured the work of John Byrne, a Scottish playwright and artist.
It included loans from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the private collection of the comedian Billy Connolly. Moray Art Centre’s latest exhibition opens on 9 June and brings together classical Greek art borrowed from the British Museum and 18th- and 19th-century drawings from the private collection of Lord Elgin. Called, Masters and Champions, it will explore the influence of classical Greece on Britain. Klinger has a 10-year plan for exhibitions at Moray Art Centre.
He is very excited about a concept for a show called Ugly, Pretty, Beautiful, which he describes as a kind of “referendum on beauty”. Like the other exhibitions he is planning, the idea is to ask questions and engage people in ideas about the nature of art and beauty.
Borrowing items from major museum collections and exposing local audiences to them is an important part of Klinger’s vision for the exhibition programme.
But it’s not just the quality of the content that is vital, the quality of the exhibition space itself is also a key factor. The main exhibition space, which meets international loan standards, was designed by Klinger to have the feel of a chapel.
“This is meant to be a place of worship, in a sense, a place of devotion to look at works very quietly ,” he says. “I found from my own experience of blockbuster shows in New York that it is just overwhelming. No matter the quality of the art, if you see it in a context that is like a shopping mall you can’t appreciate it.
"There is something about the supermarketification of art that is destructive to the perception and appreciation of it.”
The quality of the content and the space is important to Klinger because he is desperate for people to see the works in the best environment possible so that they can get the most out of the experience.
“My vision is that people will have an experience here that changes their lives or brings them to a new phase in their lives, and they will go home and think: “Why do I live this way, why do we live in a world where things of beauty are being destroyed?”
It starts with this core idea of beauty being the alleviation of pain, and uplifting the soul and the spirit.” All this talk of beauty, aesthetic orgasms and hearing voices makes Klinger sound like a dreamer, but in reality he is very focused on what he wants to achieve.
Many of the shows at Moray Art Centre have come about because Klinger is fearless about contacting curators and art historians, however senior, and asking for help. “I am able to approach people in a very direct and personal way; maybe it’s being an American too. I take a lot of chances.”
But taking chances has paid dividends and Moray Art Centre has gained important supporters. These include Freda Matassa, a former head of collections management at Tate who advises the centre. And Klinger has secured important loans from institutions such as the British Museum, the Courtauld Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland.
Sustainable vision
Klinger also seems to have a good relationship with his staff at Moray Art Centre. One describes how his “enthusiasm and passion is catching” while another says working there “has been a revelation”, because everyone can get involved in decision-making.
Klinger might have a core vision of uplifting people’s spirits and souls through art and beauty, but he is all too aware that the centre, which has no regular revenue funding, needs to be financially sustainable.
“It’s quite difficult to run a centre that has to pay its staff and also has a vision, so I don’t sleep very well,” he says. “We are operating like a social enterprise and we have to be very business-like. We are always thinking, here is an exhibition that we want to do on a visionary level and then we say how do we make it work on a financial level.”
The vision Klinger has for the centre is vitally important to him and it is something that he feels very deeply. “I grew up in a family where my father died when I was young and my mother and sister suffered from severe mental illness.
We were in the suburbs of New York and I would hitch-hike into the city and go and look at beautiful paintings and stare at them forever, or go to the Museum of Natural History and spend the day lying on the floor drawing the African and Asian mammals. That was my escape from this world of utter bleakness.
“Beauty means so much to me, as ever since I was a little boy it was my escape. I see beauty as an anti-depressant. I feel if my life adds up to creating an experience where some people are no longer depressed because of beauty, I think I would have done my job.”
Randy Klinger has been an artist since early childhood and has exhibited in Italy for the past 18 years and, more recently, Japan. Klinger was born in New York and graduated from the Cooper Union. Art historian Ernst Gombrich became his mentor later in his career.
Klinger began teaching art when he moved to Scotland and ran a small studio before opening the Moray Art Centre in 2007. He is preparing a number of major touring exhibitions, including Ugly, Pretty, Beautiful: A Question of Perception.
The £1m Moray Art Centre near Findhorn, north east Scotland, opened in 2007 and attracts up to 22,000 visitors a year. The building offers seven teaching studios and two gallery spaces, one meeting EU museum standards of environmental and security controls.
The centre is carbon-neutral and uses geothermal heat pumps and solar photovoltaic roof panels. It holds 12 exhibitions a year, ranging from historical shows featuring major loans to contemporary art shows.
The centre also holds a wide programme of classes and events that attract a broad range of people.
The gallery is a non-profit organisation and it employs four members of staff and also has four temporarily funded posts. There are more than 55 volunteers.
The project started when Klinger and his wife Catherine left his hometown of New York after a “little voice” told him that he should visit Findhorn, a village in north-east Scotland.
The voice returned in 1997 while he was making his way home through London’s Covent Garden after a long day spent trying to secure UK citizenship.
“We were watching these African dancers in the square and this voice came back and said: ‘Now that you can stay, build this centre that will be the birthplace of the next golden age to address the aesthetic orgasm.’”
From this unconventional beginning, the Moray Art Centre was born. Armed with a mission, Klinger set about spreading the word about the aesthetic orgasm, by which he means having a physical, visceral response to art and beauty rather than an intellectual response. His approach to fundraising for a place to achieve this was similarly unusual.
“Before I knew it, more than 400 people had given me a quarter of a million pounds,” says Klinger. “This was quite a disturbing period of my life as I had signed an agreement to build a £1m centre and had no idea where the rest of this money was going to come from because the first quarter of a million came like a dream, in a very magical way – I never asked for a penny.”
But he did raise the rest of the money and even the building contractor contributed £10,000 to the project. The resulting gallery, which is 100% carbon neutral, opened in 2007 in Findhorn, Moray.
An ambitious programme
However, creating the building was only the start for Klinger, as the exhibition programme he and his colleagues are delivering is just as ambitious. The aim is to provide high-quality shows of historical and contemporary art.
The museum has four members of staff but holds a remarkable 12 exhibitions a year. Its first major exhibition opened in May 2008 and featured the work of John Byrne, a Scottish playwright and artist.
It included loans from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the private collection of the comedian Billy Connolly. Moray Art Centre’s latest exhibition opens on 9 June and brings together classical Greek art borrowed from the British Museum and 18th- and 19th-century drawings from the private collection of Lord Elgin. Called, Masters and Champions, it will explore the influence of classical Greece on Britain. Klinger has a 10-year plan for exhibitions at Moray Art Centre.
He is very excited about a concept for a show called Ugly, Pretty, Beautiful, which he describes as a kind of “referendum on beauty”. Like the other exhibitions he is planning, the idea is to ask questions and engage people in ideas about the nature of art and beauty.
Borrowing items from major museum collections and exposing local audiences to them is an important part of Klinger’s vision for the exhibition programme.
But it’s not just the quality of the content that is vital, the quality of the exhibition space itself is also a key factor. The main exhibition space, which meets international loan standards, was designed by Klinger to have the feel of a chapel.
“This is meant to be a place of worship, in a sense, a place of devotion to look at works very quietly ,” he says. “I found from my own experience of blockbuster shows in New York that it is just overwhelming. No matter the quality of the art, if you see it in a context that is like a shopping mall you can’t appreciate it.
"There is something about the supermarketification of art that is destructive to the perception and appreciation of it.”
The quality of the content and the space is important to Klinger because he is desperate for people to see the works in the best environment possible so that they can get the most out of the experience.
“My vision is that people will have an experience here that changes their lives or brings them to a new phase in their lives, and they will go home and think: “Why do I live this way, why do we live in a world where things of beauty are being destroyed?”
It starts with this core idea of beauty being the alleviation of pain, and uplifting the soul and the spirit.” All this talk of beauty, aesthetic orgasms and hearing voices makes Klinger sound like a dreamer, but in reality he is very focused on what he wants to achieve.
Many of the shows at Moray Art Centre have come about because Klinger is fearless about contacting curators and art historians, however senior, and asking for help. “I am able to approach people in a very direct and personal way; maybe it’s being an American too. I take a lot of chances.”
But taking chances has paid dividends and Moray Art Centre has gained important supporters. These include Freda Matassa, a former head of collections management at Tate who advises the centre. And Klinger has secured important loans from institutions such as the British Museum, the Courtauld Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland.
Sustainable vision
Klinger also seems to have a good relationship with his staff at Moray Art Centre. One describes how his “enthusiasm and passion is catching” while another says working there “has been a revelation”, because everyone can get involved in decision-making.
Klinger might have a core vision of uplifting people’s spirits and souls through art and beauty, but he is all too aware that the centre, which has no regular revenue funding, needs to be financially sustainable.
“It’s quite difficult to run a centre that has to pay its staff and also has a vision, so I don’t sleep very well,” he says. “We are operating like a social enterprise and we have to be very business-like. We are always thinking, here is an exhibition that we want to do on a visionary level and then we say how do we make it work on a financial level.”
The vision Klinger has for the centre is vitally important to him and it is something that he feels very deeply. “I grew up in a family where my father died when I was young and my mother and sister suffered from severe mental illness.
We were in the suburbs of New York and I would hitch-hike into the city and go and look at beautiful paintings and stare at them forever, or go to the Museum of Natural History and spend the day lying on the floor drawing the African and Asian mammals. That was my escape from this world of utter bleakness.
“Beauty means so much to me, as ever since I was a little boy it was my escape. I see beauty as an anti-depressant. I feel if my life adds up to creating an experience where some people are no longer depressed because of beauty, I think I would have done my job.”
Randy Klinger at a glance
Randy Klinger has been an artist since early childhood and has exhibited in Italy for the past 18 years and, more recently, Japan. Klinger was born in New York and graduated from the Cooper Union. Art historian Ernst Gombrich became his mentor later in his career.
Klinger began teaching art when he moved to Scotland and ran a small studio before opening the Moray Art Centre in 2007. He is preparing a number of major touring exhibitions, including Ugly, Pretty, Beautiful: A Question of Perception.
Moray Art Centre at a glance
The £1m Moray Art Centre near Findhorn, north east Scotland, opened in 2007 and attracts up to 22,000 visitors a year. The building offers seven teaching studios and two gallery spaces, one meeting EU museum standards of environmental and security controls.
The centre is carbon-neutral and uses geothermal heat pumps and solar photovoltaic roof panels. It holds 12 exhibitions a year, ranging from historical shows featuring major loans to contemporary art shows.
The centre also holds a wide programme of classes and events that attract a broad range of people.
The gallery is a non-profit organisation and it employs four members of staff and also has four temporarily funded posts. There are more than 55 volunteers.