Artist's Reception: Friday, July 2, 2010, 5:30 - 7:30pm
Santa Fe, NM—LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Forrest Moses: Rock, Paper, Rivers. On view from July 2 – August 1, 2010, at LewAllen Galleries’s Downtown venue, the exhibition will present new monotypes by an artist recognized as one of the nation’s leading landscape painters. Establishing a dynamic tension between abstraction and representation, Moses’s masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke.
Profoundly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, Moses embraces the principle of wabi-sabi: the realization that things become more beautiful as they decay, age, and transition. In this way, the marks of his oil paintings and ink-based monotypes reference the practices and philosophies of sumi-e ink masters. He seeks, in his own words, "to discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” As such, his works stress brevity and simplicity to magnify the intensity of his expressions—underscoring the importance of negative space or nothingness as a juxtaposition to objects that presently exist.
The artist's deeply meditative monotypes, which frequently depict the liminal spaces at the boundaries of land and water, communicate experiences of the natural world with unassuming beauty and zen-like restraint. To create these unique works on paper, Moses 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 call upon the full scope of the artist's extraordinarily painterly instincts to communicate the energy of spontaneous execution. He approaches the medium collaboratively, relaxed, and open to discovery.
Forrest 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. With a career now in its sixth decade, Moses has had work widely exhibited in an array of premier national and international museums, most notably the World Collection, Yokohama, Japan; Pratt Institute, New York; Art Dumonde, Tokyo; and the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe. His monograph, Forrest Moses, produced by Kensho Editions and printed in Verona, Italy, is an elegant, full-color presentation of this enduring artist’s unique contribution to modern landscape painting.
