Forrest Moses is one of the most accomplished and widely acclaimed masters of abstracted landscape painting alive today. Of his work it has been said that "he paints not the image of a place in nature but its experience." A uniquely refined and graceful elegance is unmistakably related in his brushstrokes, compositions and color harmonies.

His is the genius to impart an almost hypnotic sense of place arrested in the moment: painting that is never literal but always of the essence. If his canvasses are like major symphonies, the one-of-a-kind monotypes he makes periodically are exquisite etudes, delicately composed, and harbingers of new visual melodies likely to come later in his paintings.

In his most recently completed monotypes, he captures with loose brushstrokes and restrained palette the meditative feeling of quiet, contemplative marshlands, stream edges, and river banks. He is drawn to wetlands as nearly sacred liminal space between land and water. The resulting monotypes, all completed within the past year and comprising this year's solo exhibition of Moses' work at LewAllen Contemporary in Santa Fe from Friday, June 30, through Sunday, July 30, 2006, portray a transcendental sense of "being" inherent in these mystical places.

As in his paintings—but related in the more intimate scale that monotypes permit—these new works capture the essence of standing amongst wetlands, of the visual impressions of reflected grass, woodlands and sky shimmering in the still water of ponds and marshes; indeed even the quiet sounds and musty smells of these lyrical places. But, whereas the paintings perhaps capture nature's exuberance with vibrant expressionism and sometimes vivid color, the monotypes are more subdued, more quietly introspective and serene. They reveal a different sense of nature's beauty, more muted in color and mood, but very much alive and immediate.

In his gradual evolution over the past several years to a more abstracted expression of the places that move him, Moses might be seen as an inheritor of the spirit of another visionary landscape painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder, who is often cited as the exemplar of introspective mood in American painting at the turn of the 20th Century. Ryder believed an artist "should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it... remain true to his dream ... and see naught but the vision beyond." Moses makes liberating use of the monotype to reduce detail to pure essence and thereby allow the viewer to share in his vision, a synthesis of mind and heart in his work.

Monotypes, by their nature, can encourage greater reductiveness. Etching ink is brushed, pulled, wiped, scratched, thinned and otherwise manipulated on a Plexiglas plate, then transferred to paper by an etching press. Each print is one-of-a-kind, a unique image. The process softens and only partially retains the artist's brushmarks, creating surface patterns that would be difficult to achieve by painting directly on paper. With less control over the resulting image, he approaches the medium more loosely and collaboratively, more relaxed and open to serendipitous discovery.

It has been said of Moses that he "has a camera for a sketchbook," and indeed these beautiful new monotypes derive inspiration from the same series of photographs as last year's paintings— shown in his July 2005 solo show at LewAllen Contemporary, Reflections on Water—but the monotypes are abstracted to such an extent that they lose their apparent connection to a particular place. It is for this reason he leaves them untitled, identifying them only by number. A strong attraction to Japanese aesthetics and Buddhist philosophy influences Moses' art profoundly, perhaps even more so in his monotypes than in his paintings. In these recent monotypes, the reflections of grass and decaying trees in still water appear as visual metaphors for our own still moments, for meditative practices or periods of contemplation in which we feel fully awake to nature, to our own living and being, and to the transitory nature of all things.

For Moses, painting and spiritual consciousness are intertwined. Painting nature is a spiritual practice, nearly a religion, as he avers in autobiographical notes for his book, Forrest Moses, published by Kensho Editions (2001):

"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, or 'Being Here Now.' 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." "My work is to discover nature's truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances." He says "perfection is an illusion that must not be accomplished" and talks often about how the Japanese notion ofwabi-sabi is infused in his work. That idea that things become more beautiful and complex as they age, deteriorate, and transition, is perhaps expressed most eloquently in the wetlands. For they are the in-between spaces of land and water, ancient bog places where life decays to enrich; and perhaps it is here that the spirit of wabi-sabi is most present in enlivening the extraordinary work of Forrest Moses.

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, most notably the World Collection, Yokohama, Japan; Pratt Institute, New York; Art Dumonde, Tokyo; and Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe.