Painter, draughtsman and teacher, born in Glasgow, who was brought up in a mining community in Scotland. Initially his Socialist outlook affected what he painted, influenced by Cubism and the work of French painters such as Léger; later experiences in Italy and Venezuela prompted a broader, less polemical art. Mooney attended Edinburgh College of Art, 1973–8. After he was at Royal College of Art, 1978–81, a Rome Scholarship took him to the British School in Rome, 1981–3. He was at Escuela Campo Alegre, in Caracas, in 1986 under a travel scholarship. He had his first solo show at Edinburgh College of Art in 1981 and was represented in the Royal College of Art’s Exhibition Road show in 1988. In 1991 Mooney’s mixed-media drawing Mapping Desire was included in the show East at Norwich Gallery.