Reception: Friday, June 29, 5:30-7:30

Santa Fe, NM— With a hand as natural as the landscapes that inspire him, Forrest Moses brings the experience of nature’s rich colors and rhythmic vitality to oils on canvas. Now in his eighth decade, and in his fourth decade as a resident of Santa Fe, this dean of Santa Fe painting is one of America’s most accomplished and widely acclaimed virtuosos of landscape abstraction, merging lush color harmonies and gestural expressiveness in work that uncannily conveys the intimate experience of place rather than simply a likeness.

In a recent essay for the catalogue of new work in Moses’ solo exhibition named River’s Edge (which opens on June 29 at LewAllen Contemporary in Santa Fe) prominent art critic and art historian Jan Adlmann asserts Moses’ place in a powerful progression towards transcendentalism in Western art. He opines that “Moses’ ascent to abstract expressionism (lower case, as this is, in the end, the 21st century) doesn’t necessarily arise from his immersion in Oriental art and thought, however much he may cite this inspiration in recent years”; and then he avers,

It is highly possible that Moses’ new work is, in the end, rooted in the European Romantic tradition, where artists, beginning with the German Caspar David Friedrich, through Turner, to our Hudson River School, have striven, in landscape, to reveal something beyond mere appearances, to achieve nothing less than the transcendental, the purely spiritual.

Appearances in Moses’ capacious landscape paintings become reality. It is a reality of personal presence paused in space, a zen-like knowing of and reverence for place in nature and a meditative experience of the world, its trees, grasses, sky and most especially water. The appearances of light, color, line and reflection blend creating an almost mystical abstract sense of the universal experience of nature with an immediacy that Moses calls “Being Here Now.”

Moses’ paintings capture nature’s exuberance with vigorous, loose brushwork and sometimes vivid but always harmonious color. He blends keen observation (using his own photographs as source material) and an intuitive, one might say visionary, grasp of nature’s essence. Transferring that vision to canvas, he enters an almost meditative state of being totally in the moment and place, not conscious of any thought or preplanning.

Moses says: “I believe being awake—fully awake—is the whole point. Being awake gives one access to the true nature of living and being in the moment … I find that ‘being’ in Nature is the best way for me. . . . [The truth], or perhaps it is best to say, my truth unfolds by meditation on the land in the course of my work.”

With multi-layered brush strokes that quiver and dance across the canvas just as reflected colors and shapes quiver and dance on a river’s surface, Moses transcends realism to evoke what Adlmann describes as “sheer exuberance, the pure flux of nature.” In his essay for the River’s Edge catalogue, Adlmann writes:

What Moses seems to convey, perhaps, is what was called, in the Middle Ages, the marvel of natura naturans, the phenomenon of “nature naturing” before our eyes. In fact, Moses has said that “my work is to discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” [Adlmann’s italics added]

Moses has focused his work on the subject of reflected images for some time now. He likes painting reflections on water, he says, because they “offer the most opportunity for abstraction.”

“You can get very loose and abstract with reflected images on water,” he told an interviewer. “It involves, usually, quite shallow water with grasses growing, rocks lying beneath or rising above the surface, leaves floating and leaves reflected. The elements are complex, and so there are great opportunities for abstraction with shapes and color.”

The paintings in this year’s show are based mostly on photographs Moses has taken during visits over the past year to woodland streams in western Connecticut and marshlands along the Connecticut coast. A few are based on photographs of fall color in New Mexico and leaf patterns in the Peruvian Amazon, which he also visited in the past year.

Usually, several images are brought together in a single painting, either to solve problems or to create a more complex, layered image. As he paints, however, “it’s just process; it’s not even thought about. The imagery takes form and pushes you in different directions, sometimes away from the photographed image and sometimes closer to it, but usually if I see it getting too close to the image I try to move it in the other direction again, towards greater abstraction.”

In addition to his paintings on canvas, River’s Edge includes a number of monotypes of the same subject and, for the first time, digital artwork created from Moses’ photographs in collaboration with Gary Mankus of Santa Fe Editions. These photographed images are tightly cropped “to get those parts of the images that were abstract and beautiful.” Most are images he has not yet painted, and he says he may never paint them. These beautiful and independent works of art offer a rare opportunity to see examples of the wondrous images from nature that inspire his paintings.

Moses was born in 1934 in Danville, Virginia. He holds a bachelor’s in fine art from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and spent two years at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn studying design and architecture. His life and work were profoundly influenced by the Japanese aesthetic he encountered during three years of naval service in the Far East. For the past forty years his work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in a wide array of premier national and international museums, including the World Collection, Yokohama, Japan; Pratt Institute, New York; Art Dumonde, Tokyo; and Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe.

LewAllen Contemporary is open 9:30-5:30 Monday through Thursday, 9:30-6:30 Friday and Saturday, and 10:00-5:00 Sunday. River’s Edge will run from Friday, June 29, through Sunday, July 29. For further information please contact Diane Kell at (505) 988-8997 or [email protected].