Meister Eckhart

Three years service as a naval officer gave Moses an opportunity to spend time in the Philippines, Japan and other Far East locations. The Japan experience had a strong visual and philosophical influence on him. Moses felt at home with the organized space and uncluttered environments. Now Moses observes, “An empty space, an empty table, creates tension with anticipation of what might occupy it. While an object finds its importance to the space
it occupies.”

After service, Moses spent a year in Europe discovering the art and architecture presented during his Art History education and then in 1959, he entered Pratt Institute in New York for two years graduate work in design.

The Pratt years put solidly in focus, by intensive exercise and discipline, design principles relating to shape, space, scale, texture, color, etc.

Moses then worked for three years in Houston, Texas, as a designer of interiors, furniture, ceramics and there developed an intent to paint full time.

In 1965 he moved from Houston to the Monterey Peninsula, California. It was a decision that painting was for him an exercise for contemplation of nature and the unfoldment of truth by observation. An intense period of work followed and for three years, his interest centered on the content of the land and sea and that fragile line of meeting. Isolation and routine provided the time for introspection and work.

Now there developed in Moses a need for place. The  “Place” is crucial for it becomes the sanctuary for the heart. For Moses, it was to be a place in the sun. New Mexico has been Moses’ home since 1969.

The work produced since 1965 has created more than 40 one-man shows for galleries, universities and museums in Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, Albuquerque, Austin, and others. There have been numerous group shows, invitations, lectures, teaching and print making activities. Moses’ work is established in many private, public and corporate collections.

Process: Forrest Moses uses the camera as a sketch devise to study a subject in different light and attitudes. The photographs identify what is relevant to the character of a subject. Photography can release form from motion, intensify contrast, stop time. It identifies the full and empty space. The camera benefits the search for rhyme and reason.

In painting, Moses is an expressionist. The expressionist’s stroke of the brush leaves the mark of the artist’s energy. The form develops in a direct and spontaneous way.

The expressionist line requires courage, risk and the skill of craft.

In Moses’ paintings, process remains evident, understanding that life is found in search,
not completion.

  The Monotype: In the process, etching ink is brushed, pushed, wiped, scratched, thinned and otherwise manipulated on a plexiglas plate and transferred to paper by an etching press. One unique image is produced. Moses uses the monotype to interpret land images as well as Flower and Figure.

The  Monotype of flower images expresses the relationship of space and form. Often “oriental-esque”, the flowers become symbol images drawing power from tension of bold-delicate, rich-pale shape and color.

The Monotypes of landscapes utilize the same subject as the large more formal oil paintings. Looser in line and color, the monotypes are less objective without losing image identity.

Figures: Drawing from the figure, the expression and gesture is definitive with a limited line.

The Practice: Moses believes, “Nature is the creative principle. Man is the beholder, the witness. Process is man becoming the Universe, witnessing itself.” The Practice then is to witness and record an expression that gives evidence of place, time… passing by
and… through.

Statement: To investigate the use of object, land and figure in order to open the eye to see and to trust the intuitive, personally observed universe manifesting work by the creative principle.

        “I have a strong sense of order.” Forrest Moses has said, “Within that order, there can be chaos, there can be confusion, and there can be surprise.” In this throw-away manifesto, Moses, a long-time painter of the effulgent landscape of the “Land of Enchantment” identifies exactly that calibration of control and abandon that has raised his work appreciably above the customary cliches or the tedious topographical.

Regular observers and collectors of this artist’s work have seen considerable growth and refinement taking place there in recent years; growth which can be likely laid, at least in part, to some new willingness to let go — as his foregoing comment seems to support. What we are witnessing is an artist maturing both literally and in the sense that he has found the courage to push off from the safe haven of his long-established reputation into riskier waters — in sum, he’s let go of what he was, in order perhaps, to become something better. Admirable, especially in a place where lucrative careers have been built on proven formulae.

Another impetus behind Forrest Moses’ unaccustomed new gutsiness may well be a body of prints he has avidly — and wildly successfully — pursued in the 1980’s: working at Santa Fe’s Handgraphics, among other places. Moses has created truly bravura monotypes in a very Japanese manner of attack in these severe but elegant images. In these prints and increasingly in his large-scale painting, the artist is developing a slashing, new, shorthand brushstroke and, occasionally, a nervous “in-drawing” in his paintings, where pigment is removed, revealing the canvas underneath. Apparently, there is a new urgency in this artist’s enterprise, a drive to fa presto.

Another wild card that may have given this artist’s latest painting new vitality is his increasing need to range much farther a field from New Mexico in his search for landscape that satisfies his need for new density in his compositions. The “murmuring pines and the hemlocks” and the often almost impenetrably thick virgin forests of New England, for example, provide him with striking contrasts — and an exciting challenge — after the coruscating light and arid sparseness of his own Rocky Mountain environment. Finally, we could speculate that Moses’ most recent landscapes, with their very muted, autumnal palette, nervously-drawn, spindly trees laid bare, and wintry skies, suggest the artist has found a new note in nature far less joyous than before, an elegiac note, of fragility and of transience.

The eye must be developed, that it may perceive nature most intimate and wonderful life. As to the hand.. it must simply be capable of fulfilling the soul’s will, rapidly easily, and beautifully.     Carus

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