When arts writer Carl Little gave a slide talk on Maine coast painters last year, he included a segment on crashing waves.

“It’s a great tradition in Maine,” he said, one he illustrated with the works of Winslow Homer, George Bellows, N.C. Wyeth and Robert Eric Moore.

“You can tell a Moore across the room,” Little explained. “He has a real signature style, a certain palette, a certain way of approaching his work that says Robert Eric Moore all over it.

“It’s such a great motif, and he does it exceptionally well. He just captures the power of the waves, the kind of thunderous interaction that we in Maine know so well,” said Little, who lives on Mount Desert Island and is former associate editor of Art in America.

Moore’s waves may be fiercely sharp-edged if he’s working in acrylic, or disappear into foam when the medium is watercolor. One thing is for sure. There’s nothing static about a Robert Eric Moore painting. There’s always something going on.

The point of course, is not what Moore looks at, but what he takes in. It’s a point that is clear even when no ocean is in sight.

In Moore’s 200-year-old home on a side road in Waldoboro, father and son stand looking out a window on a fine day in early spring.

“What do you see?” Michael Moore asks, peering over his father’s shoulder. Across the road are bare branches of myriad trees. The woods are still.

But Moore lifts his painting hand in gesture and starts talking about “areas of activity” in the scenery.

It’s a phrase the 73-year-old artist uses a lot in explaining his landscapes and seascapes, his wildlife scenes.

“I love to do brooks, woodland scenes, oceans. I love ice forms, all this activity,” Moore says.

There it is again, that word – “activity.”

Moore describes his work as semi-abstract, an apt term. You know what it is you’re looking at, but there’s no sense of art as a snapshot, or a moment frozen in time.

For him, nature is a living, moving thing, and something he knows well.

It’s easy to call the New Hampshire native a fisherman, a hunter – and he is both of those. The rack and head of a deer he shot are mounted on one wall in his small studio at one end of the farmhouse.

A small sign, crafted by Michael in his childhood, proclaims, “Champion deer slayer Robert Moore.”

“Completely misguided,” Michael Moore says with the Irish grin he inherited from both sides of his family.

But it’s obvious that for Moore, the trophies are, truly, secondary.

“If you were not hunting, you would not be observing all this activity,” he reflects, sharing an experience he had trying to blend into the background while hunting.

“I spent three days in one place. A gray squirrel jumped on me. He thought I was a stump. One deer came out, I missed him. You watch the sun come up, you watch the sun go down,” he says.

A fishing trip can provide the same distractions, Michael points out.

“We went fishing once, and he just became fascinated with all these lichens on a cliff,” he says. “Once, he spotted a Wilson’s warbler, so he did a series of paintings.”

“I always felt I was an artist,” says his dad, “from the very beginning.” Truly, artistic talent and an appreciation of nature are in Moore’s genes.

He was born in the New Hampshire city of Manchester. His artistic ability stems from his grandmother, still-life painter Lila Moore, and his appreciation of the outdoors from both the Moores and the Blaisdells.

Carefully, Moore draws from a shelf a small book that belonged to his grandfather, Maurice Blaisdell – railroad man, historian and naturalist. He runs his fingers over the page marked May 26, 1946, when his grandfather, then 71, made a lengthy list of birds he had seen, including the Blackburnian warbler.

The artist also has his own sketchbooks from the ’40s when, as a teen-ager, he would make field drawings of what he saw in the woods.

“I get more out of drawing than I do from a photograph. Drawing, you get the essential ingredients,” he says, elements which may then become a painting. Drawing is simply a part of his outdoor experience.

His love of the sea influenced a choice he made after finishing high school in 1945. Moore joined the U.S. Navy, coming in at the end of World War II and serving aboard the destroyer USS Gyatt, DD-712.

Leaving the service in 1947, he went on to study art at the University of New Hampshire, and then at the New England School of Art in Boston.

He married Meg Doherty, herself an artist, and in 1954 the couple moved to York, Maine. It was an area Moore knew well, having spent summers there visiting his paternal grandparents.

For some four decades the couple lived in York, raising children Bridget, Michael and Deirdre. They now have five grandchildren.

The family was very much a part of the artistic life of southern Maine. Both Robert Eric and Meg Moore participated in the first annual show of the York Art Association in 1957. Bridget is a gallery owner in New York, and Michael co-owned a gallery briefly with his sister before entering journalism. Deirdre also works in art.

It was in York that Moore’s reputation as a coastal artist grew. One such painting was chosen to accompany the section on Maine in World Book Encyclopedia during the ’60s.

His work also can be found in Edward Betts’ “Creative Seascapes” and Ralph Fabri’s “History of the American Watercolor Society.”

But the waves themselves are not the only signs of movement in his works, Moore points out. The viewer’s eye moves with the motion in the changing levels of rock here, rests on an area of quiet water there.

Moore isn’t afraid to use the darkest colors that some painters avoid.

“A lot of artists are death against solid black. I like solid black, and I love the solid rock forms of Maine,” he said, gesturing again to show how the use of light and color create turbulence in an ocean watercolor.

“This is solid down here, middle here, then light,” he says, passing his hand by each area.

Even in a painting of what looks like a still beach, a field of blue chicory flowers fairly vibrates.

There’s movement, too, in his seemingly quiet woods scenes, especially the ones featuring animal tracks. They connote not only his love for hunting and the woods, but his naturalist heritage.

Among the shells and lichen that decorate his studio, Moore keeps castings of otter, fox and raccoon tracks. He also likes to paint birds and animals themselves.

“There were eight turkeys out here yesterday,” he exclaims with pride to Michael.

Growing up with an artist father was a unique experience, the son says.

“Everybody else didn’t know quite what to make of it. He was the only self-employed father – and the preferred chauffeur on Boy Scout camping trips,” he recalls.

“In the spring we’d go fishing, in the fall we’d go hunting. We’d go hiking in the snow. He’d do sketching, I’d do sketching,” Michael says.

Moore’s works are in the collections of museums such as the Farnsworth, and are on display in galleries including the Talent Tree in Augusta and Firehouse Gallery in Damariscotta.

Art lovers respond not only to Moore’s seascapes, saysConnie Moss, who owns Firehouse Gallery with husband Michael Moss, but to paintings such as one of wild turkeys that makes liberal use of greens and golds.

In another work, snow falls softly in dense woods. Yet the title is “Distant Sun,” and sure enough, there’s a sun in the background.

Moss likes the fact that the title makes the viewer think twice.

“You look at it differently,” she says.

The gallery owner also admires the “simple lines” evident in Moore works. “They’re almost like Japanese brush paintings.”

In fact, Moore says, “I love oriental woodcuts – really, playing with shapes.”

He has books of such art and, on the table where he paints, cards with a variety of oriental markings. The lines they inspire add “a zip, a spark” to his paintings.

Moore also acknowledges being influenced by Indian arts, which he loves.

“I also like Robert Motherwell – how dramatic his work is. And I like Cezanne’s work. Initially, his work was more fractionalized,” he says.

Moore’s own work displays some use geometric shapes, an occasionally “fractionalized” quality. So, of course, did Port Clyde artist William Thon, who died in December.

“I would also compare Moore to Thon in some ways, in focus,” says Little. “They were also both prolific.”

There’s nothing fancy about Moore’s studio, which seems to grow smaller still, the more paintings he hangs.

His worktable is nothing special, and his chair – well, it’s just an old chair, then a drawer, topped off by two pillows.

Moore perches on the contraption and puts one leg up to demonstrate his posture while painting. By now, he has been working at art for more than a half century, but he has no thought of stopping.

He is a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society, and his works have made the cut in dozens of juried shows where only fraction of hundreds of entries go on display.

This year alone, his paintings have been shown by the California Watercolor Association, the Hilton Head Art League, the Midwest Watercolor Society, the Ohio Watercolor Society and the Arizona Aqueous XVI National.

But it’s clear Moore paints for himself.

“You never get tired of it. It just gets more interesting as you go along. I hope I find new areas of thought,” he said, punctuating the idea with that Irish grin.

“The painting I like best is the one I’m going to do tomorrow.”