FORREST MOSES
Natural Abstractions
Living on the Monterey Peninsula in the 1960s, Forrest Moses often visited Point Lobos where the realization came to him that if he looked and he listened, real truths would be expressed.
In a monograph of his work he wrote, “You see, 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.’”
Being in the present, he is conscious of his presence in nature and its presence in him. His paintings are abstract mark making. His brushstrokes and the marks of his ink-based monotypes recall those of the Japanese sumi-e masters whose aesthetics he admires.
He says, “Paintings are not pictures of nature. Nature is nature and paintings are paintings.” He develops “an image within a field of marks, and some I keep and some I remove and I stop
before there is complete resolution to allow the life of change without conclusion…” Yet, there remains a connection to his paintings’ source in nature.
LewAllen Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, presents Forrest Moses: Survey Exhibition Honoring the 85th birthday of Santa Fe’s Abstracted Landscape Master through June 15. It is “the first solo show of Moses’ paintings since 2012 and brings together more than 30 works that together provide a survey of his artistic evolution over the past five decades.”
Some of the paintings in the exhibition are from the artist’s personal collection and others are from the collection of Charles MacKay and Cameron McCluskey. MacKay retired last summer as general director of the Santa Fe Opera, and has been, for many years, a close friend of the artist.
One of the paintings from their collection is Rock with Reflection at Tesuque, 1983. After moving to Santa Fe in 1969 Moses looked down as he was walking in the desert and found a new world of color and form within the banks of an arroyo. He photographed the forms and their arrangements as well as their color relationships and translated them into tight vignettes of loose brushstrokes.
His expressionistic Deep Wood Pond, 2012, is another exploration of form and color, the product of a finely tuned awareness of the beauty in the unexpected. The gallery notes, “For Moses, painting is an act of reverence for the beauty inherent in the natural world, where the aesthetic of decay is as important as that of growth, and where he seeks to ‘capture the aliveness’ of nature and convey its sense of the sacred.”
LewAllen Galleries 1613 Paseo de Peralta • Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 988-3250 • www.lewallengalleries.com