Reception: Friday, July 4, 5:30-7:30

Forrest Moses is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading abstract painters of landscape. LewAllen Contemporary conducts exhibitions of his expressionistic abstractions in oil on canvas in alternate years with showings of his even further abstracted monotypes. Following on the heels of last year’s high-selling show of oils, this summer’s exhibition of Moses monotypes entitled Forest Impressions (July 4-27) promises to offer the latest, most refined examples of the artist’s elegantly reductive works on paper revealing the visionary, nature-inspired aspects of his always intriguing work. Moses has a genius for creating from image and material a graceful feeling of place and communion with nature. His aim is to discover nature’s truth, what he has called “the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” With the eye of a poet, he explores the quiet, meditative interiors of forests and marshlands, from Maine to Georgia, as well as New Mexico and other locations, gathering images and emotional impressions for paintings and monotypes that are widely sought-after for some of the world’s finest collections of contemporary art.

The monotypes he has created for this exhibition invite us to contemplate the pure essence of nature with its simple, quiet beauty, its patterns and textures and their reflections in water. With these gently elegant impressions, in a palette of grays, blacks, silvers and tints of other hues, Moses captures a kind of austere, natural beauty that seems modest, effortless, authentic and insightful. The quiet, zen-like serenity of the works recalls the Japanese aesthetic of shibui, an ideal of unassuming, simple beauty that holds deep, intrinsic meaning. It is an ideal Moses embraces as fully descriptive of his aim in these works.

To create the work, he brushes or pours etching ink onto an acrylic plate, then wipes, pushes, scratches, thins or otherwise manipulates the ink before passing the plate through a press. The result is a unique, non-reproducible image with surface patterns and textures that are not completely predictable. The artist must approach the medium collaboratively, relaxed and open to discovering what the medium itself will reveal.

Born in Danville, Virginia, in 1934, Moses graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He entered the Navy as an air intelligence officer and served three years in the Far East where he became acquainted with Asian culture. In particular, he says, “I was a sponge for Japanese colors, textures, sounds, architecture, gardens, and, of course, design and art.” He spent two years after his military service in graduate study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He has been a full-time artist in Santa Fe for nearly 40 years. His much-loved work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in a wide array of premier galleries and museums and has entered many outstanding private and public collections.