Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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On a hill in Southwest Roanoke County lives a man who sold his first piece of art 37 years ago.

He labors night and day on his unusual creations and sells them worldwide.

Yet, when asked what percentage of his work is art and how much of it is craft, he just laughs and says, "It's 1 percent art."

The man is Ned Moulton. He is 70, probably 6 feet tall, and he has a white beard, gray-and-white hair and a winning self-deprecation.

It belies both the work he has put in and the satisfaction he has derived from his ... things.

Earlier in his life, when he lived in Florida, he spent 10 years trying to capture the faces of beautiful women. Ultimately, he developed a way of bending Plexiglas and painting on it. The faces looked spectacular.

His fellow Floridians loved them.

"I got pretty well-known and pretty well-off," Moulton said.

He promptly lost interest in making the things.

He spent additional years learning how to paint horses and jockeys racing toward the homestretch -- and lots of other stuff. Depending on their size, pairs of competing horses range from $200 to $600.

Bicycle racers, wild animals and other images can be found in his inventory, all painted with acrylics on wood that he coats with resin to give them a shine.

The renovation of the lobby at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital is not complete, but one wall already bears Moulton's works.

Photos by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Artist Ned Moulton paints a hippopotamus Tuesday in his home studio in Roanoke County. Moulton has been commissioned by Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital to create an animal scene in the lobby. His pieces are made of particle board and finished to give them a sheen.

Moulton's artwork at Roanoke Memorial includes an elephant, giraffes and a toucan. All his pieces are painted with acrylics to give them a shine.

The lobby's first floor holds one giraffe that is 13 feet tall and a smaller one, plus an elephant, a toucan and a pair of squirrel monkeys.

The second-floor wall features loons.

Moulton said he'd never heard of loons until the wife of a University of North Carolina football coach saw some of his horses in a Chapel Hill gallery. She wanted loons.

She sent pictures of loons to him, and he started to make them. The loons at Carilion are black and white with spots, with the exception of one that is bright blue.

Moulton said that he mixed the colors wrong on that one.

He and Nancy, to whom he has been married for 50 years, moved to Roanoke because their daughter, Lynda McNutt Foster, lived here, and because of its central location. They used to take his art to outdoor shows, but now they go to just one per year, in Louisville, Ky., where business is good.

Louisville is horse country, Moulton said. Other forays into other supposed horse places in this country have taught him an important lesson: "Horses don't buy paintings."

There is a hit-or-miss aspect to his line of work, but that's OK because he enjoys the process.

"I work all the time," he said. "I'm a blue-collar painter."

His studio fills the wing they added to their house in Southwest County. Wooden figures lie here and there, waiting to be coated with resin.

The Moultons' son, Tim, lives in Florida. Their other daughter, Gwendolyn McBride, is a nurse at Roanoke Memorial.

That's just a coincidence. Jim Bohn, the manager of the Carilion Design Group, noticed Moulton's works during a personal shopping trip to Black Dog Salvage in Roanoke.

He asked Moulton if he could make larger things. Moulton said he could. Carilion used a donation to buy the works to put them in what will become a child-friendly area of the lobby, with child-sized furnishings. The artist declined to reveal the cost.

Moulton said early in his life he spent 10 years in the National Teacher Corps teaching English to poor children in Miami.

"I loved the kids," he said, "and couldn't stand the administrators."

On the other hand, he said, "They had to deal with me. I very much sympathized with them."

Now he lives and works for half of the year in Florida and half here. He does his things and sells them in about a dozen galleries. Three orders are pending -- jockeys and racehorses to a gallery in London, polo players and ponies to some place in Spain, and more racehorses to Indonesia.