Forrest Moses: 50 Year Survey

Forrest Moses 50 YEAR SURVEY

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Forrest Moses 50 Year Survey

April 26 - June 15, 2019

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Vermont Stream in October Woods (detail), 1994, oil on canvas, 48 x 66 inches

Forrest Moses: 50 Year Survey This exhibit of paintings and works on paper celebrates the 50th anniversary of Forrest’s presence in Santa Fe. During this time, he has made lasting contributions to the arts community in Santa Fe and far beyond. Hundreds of private collectors and museums have been drawn to his alluring landscape images, represented here by works spanning virtually his entire career.

When Forrest came to Santa Fe in 1969, he was drawn by the quality of the light, the beauty of the land and the open skies. It was also part of a spiritual quest: Forrest has always been a seeker of truth and beauty; meditating, studying philosophy and delving into studies of spiritualism. He made fast friends in Santa Fe – friendships that have endured to this day. The cultural scene was immeasurably enriched by Forrest’s uncompromising pursuit of quality, his sense of humor and his disarming candor. He is one of Santa Fe’s treasures.

In looking at this varied collection, it is fascinating to see that Forrest’s work has evolved – and yet in many ways it has remained constant. His landscapes are for the most part representational, the recent work somewhat more abstract, with the play of light and color on water as a constant theme. Over the years, his work has encompassed furniture design, lithography, pottery (in Carmel before he came to Santa Fe), monotypes, photography, figure drawing and, above all, oil on canvas.

Like a fine pianist who hones his technique playing scales and arpeggios, Forrest

has drawn the male figure consistently throughout his career. He has always been drawn to an Eastern aesthetic – when I first knew him, his home seemed to me like a Zen shrine.

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collector of fine arts and antiques he has a fine and discerning eye. Some say his homes — in Santa Fe and Palm Springs — are among the pinnacles of his artistic achievement Forrest and I met 45 years ago and have remained close ever since. In the early years of our friendship, we traveled and visited museums here and around the country. For me, as someone in his early twenties whose primary interest was music, it was an extraordinary gift to have such an accomplished and perceptive teacher in the visual arts. Of course, he also encouraged my love of opera. Without his guidance, I’m not sure my career would have unfolded as it did. I like to

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Single Iris, monotype, 6.5 x 9 inches

think that my love of opera may have influenced him in turn. Over the years, I’ve often found him listening to opera as he painted. In some ways, his paintings are operatic in scale, beauty and impact.

My partner Cam and I were incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to collect Forrest’s work and to have been surrounded by these remarkable works over the last four decades.

Forrest’s paintings and monotypes are astonishingly beautiful. For us they have been sources of constant wonder -- and even mystery.

It will be a joy to see this exhibit and to savor Forrest’s remarkable achievements. For all of us who will have the pleasure of seeing this stunning survey of Forrest’s work, we express our deep gratitude to LewAllen Galleries, to Ken Marvel and Bob Gardner and to Forrest’s dear friend and close colleague, Larry Brown.

On the occasion of his 85th birthday, we wish Forrest continued success and much, much happiness.

Charles MacKay

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LewAllen Galleries is honored and very proud to present this celebratory survey of Forrest Moses’s long and accomplished career on the occasion of the artist’s 85th birthday. The exhibition is the first solo show of Moses’s paintings since 2012 and brings together more than thirty works that together provide a survey of his artistic evolution over the past five decades. The gallery is also honored to include in this exhibition important works from the private collection of Charles MacKay and Cameron McCluskey. MacKay, who retired last summer as the highly acclaimed General Director of The Santa Fe Opera, has been, for many years, a close personal friend of the artist’s.

Now in his ninth decade, Moses is recognized as one of the finest abstracted landscape painters in American art history for his resolute vision to make paintings that are more the imprint of nature’s beauty than its mere replica. For over 54 years, Moses has created graceful visual responses to place through intuiting distinctive and complex rhythms of color, line, and form that reveal the sudden transcendent quality of the simple yet profound experience of being in nature.

Quiet and meditative, his work is thought of as an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where changing seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, carefully balanced compositions include only the essentials for evocation, and a painterly fluidity informs each brushstroke in service of suggestive contemplation.

Moses’s paintings have long inspired dedicated collecting and his reputation has grown to near iconic dimension for his unique mastery of the sublimity of nature. This he accomplishes through intuitive openness to the pulses and vibrations of nature’s quiet beauty – the up-swelling harmonies of color, the simplicity of line and form – and channeling them with loving honesty into his painting. The result is images of quiescent tranquility adduced from his solitary moments of profound experience in nature, his heart leading his mind in a vision that unfolds without intention. A lifetime of contemplating nature has rendered Moses a near-visionary of the exalted eminence of the natural world and enabled him to infuse his art with its spiritual energy, at times nearly indistinguishable from his own.

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There are foundational paintings included in the exhibit – several from both the artist’s and the McKay/McCluskey collection – that embody Moses’ fluid interplay between the real-life locations inspiring his imagery and a resonant sense of the land emblematic of something universal. Rather than seeking to capture the landscape with verisimilitude, Moses’s goal is to transform it on canvas, manifesting what he calls “an expressionistic response to a figurative subject.” 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.

The result of this approach is recognizable landscape forms that simultaneously lean away from literal reproduction. The evidence of process in his mark-making mirrors Moses’ focus on deconstructing the landscape into glowing, abstracted patches of color, and through brushstrokes that recall Japanese or Chinese brush painting. In his hands, saplings and branches are transformed into graceful, calligraphic marks, and evocations of ground and sky are mapped out into regions of ragged texture that take delight in the sheer painterly possibilities of otherwise unmodulated color. It is a process of distillation into essentials and intensification of artistic response to the glories and poetry of nature, to its truth and meaning, that Moses so articulately expresses in the language of his art.

Many American painters of landscape are concerned mainly to capture and embrace on canvas the overt splendor of grand vistas, purple mountain majesties, spacious skies and other pictures of America the Beautiful. Moses, by contrast, extracts from his experience of the American land a quality that is reflective, indirect, quiet, hidden, meditative – a quality present in the place and in the experience of the place that together he expresses in his work as the sublime.

Profoundly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, Moses embraces the principles of wabi-sabi.

These two words merge into a single powerful idea of aesthetics that Moses’s work perfectly expresses. Wabi translates as “poverty” and, as a principle of beauty, it involves the humble and

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beauty of imperfection. Sabi means “loneliness”, and in aesthetics it relates to the subjectivity of an artist’s vision as well as the sparseness of what is seen and remembered. It is the quality of stillness and solitude, pensive contemplation and yearning that beauty and sublimity exquisitely possess.

Thus, wabi-sabi is the aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, of imperfection and austerity, of embracing the way nature is in truth rather than idealized in myth. It enthusiastically finds beauty in this honesty. It is at the heart of Moses’s remarkable work: this deep affirmation of the beauty of the weathered, the broken, the bare, the ephemeral; the mysterious, wonderful beauty of the sublime. The realization that things become more beautiful as they decay, age, and transition empowers Moses’s own aesthetic. 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.” In this way, Moses paints from the inside of nature rather than as its spectator, and his deep identification with his subject emanates through profound feelings into visual articulation of the very spirit of nature.

This is the heart of Moses’s remarkable work: his deep affirmation of the beauty of truth and his embrace of the weathered, the broken, the bare, the ephemeral; the wonderful mysterious beauty of the sublime. It is here that the genius and power of Moses’s work resides, and it is from here that his work will forever remain enduringly engaging.

Kenneth R. Marvel

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Carmel, California, 1967 oil on canvas, 26 x 30 inches

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Santa Fe (571), 1972 oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches 8

Santa Fe, 1974 oil on canvas, 40 x 48 inches 9

Santa Fe (7501), 1975 oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches 10

Tesuque Watershed Detail #3, 1981 oil on canvas, 30 x 32 inches 11

Stream Near Cundijo: Rocks and Water #2, 1979 oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches

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Rio Grande at Pilar #3, 1983 oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches

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Santa Fe, 1975 oil on canvas, 48 x 50 inches

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River Run, 1971 oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

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Rio Grande at Pilar #4, 1983 oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches

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Summer-Water Run: Sangre de Cristo #3, 1982 oil on canvas, 40 x 61 inches

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Canyon Blanca, 1984, oil on canvas, 48 x 50 inches

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Vermont Stream in October Woods, 1994, oil on canvas, 48 x 66 inches

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River Bottomland at Galisteo, 1983 oil on canvas, 40 x 42 inches

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Tesuque Watershed oil on canvas, 28 x 30 inches

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Galisteo Riverbed: October, 1989 oil on canvas, 40 x 42 inches

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October Stream Detail, 1996 oil on canvas, 30 x 32 inches

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Eastern Landscape, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

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Rock with Reflection at Tesuque, NM, 1983 oil on canvas, 40 x 42 inches 27

October Forest, 1993 oil on canvas, 50 x 48 inches

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Wood With Small Stream, 1999 oil on canvas, 51 x 67 inches

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Morning Light, 1990 oil on canvas, 48 x 96 inches

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Morning Light October, 1991 oil on canvas, 72 x 48 inches

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October Dream, Vermont Stream, 1998 oil on canvas, 48 x 50 inches

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Arizona Waterway in October, 1994 oil on canvas, 36 x 96 inches

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Woodland With Green, 2003 oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches

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Blue Pond, 2005 oil on canvas, 30 x 32 inches

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Slow Water Reflections, 1996 oil on canvas, 72 x 36 inches

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Mountain Water, 2008 oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches 39

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October Stream, 2003 oil on canvas, 46 x 96 inches

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Valley Wetland, 2007 oil on canvas, 50 x 52 inches

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Small Water Wash, 2005 oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches

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Deep Wood Pond, 2012 oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

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Still Water Reflections #2, 2007 oil on board, 32 x 32 inches

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Beaver Pond, 2007, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches

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Autumn Reflection, 2012 oil on canvas, 36 x 95.75 inches

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Tree At Water's Edge, c. early 1980s monotype, 9 x 11.75 inches

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Fall, 1976 lithograph (ed. 23/25), 15 x 20 inches

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Under the Double Moon, 1987 monotype, 20.5 x 32 inches

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Amaryllis, lithograph (artist proof), 19.75 x 15.5 inches

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L: Small Iris Blossom monotype, 19.75 x 16 inches R: Untitled lithograph (ed. 16/200), 8.5 x 8.5 inches

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Field of Irises monotype, 22.75 x 35 inches

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Iris I, 1991 monotype, 30 x 22 inches

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Iris II, 1991 monotype, 30 x 22 inches

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Ghost Landscape, c. 1990s monotype, 36 x 22.5 inches

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Trees in Fall monotype, 32.5 x 22.5 inches

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M 13/20, 2013 monotype, 41 x 29 inches 60

Forrest Moses was born in 1934 in Danville, Virginia. A former Naval officer in the Philippines, Moses travelled to Japan, Guam, and Hong Kong, and his time spent in eastern Asia had profound influence on the development of his own art. He holds a BFA 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 as a painter spanning more than six decades, Moses has had work widely exhibited in an array of premier national and international museums, most notably the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; 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.

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Š 2019 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC 64 Artwork Š Forrest Moses