![]() ![]() And, equal to my fascination with alchemy, I’ve always been interested in fractal imagery. “It’s never specific, but they’re very suggestive of many things simultaneously. “So I’m looking for these images that are a little bit elusive,” Moses continues. “I’m still exploring.” The paint is alive I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just exploring paint on a two-dimensional plane.”Īnd that’s what you’re doing now, you’re exploring. “I continued with the finger painting and then did things with my hands. He came up and saw the one I had and he put it up on the wall, and he said ‘Now here’s a real artist,’ whatever that meant. “He had everybody do an independent project, and my project was finger painting on a canvas. It all began with an art class at a junior college in Long Beach taught by Pedro Miller, while Moses was actually a pre-med student. The ideas come from the previous encounter.” These are quite singular works, but remember, with Ed Moses one piece leads to another. I put rocks on some of them and X’s on other ones to establish their two-dimensionality.” “I like the reflections,” he says, “what it does to the paintings in the background it changes the shapes. Anything reflected on the surface is slightly distorted, as in a funhouse mirror. In one of the galleries, or viewing rooms, he points to recent work with a mirrored surface. If some of the canvases begin to head off in an undesired direction, they get pulled in via the whitewash treatment, and Moses begins anew. So I learned, why not work on five or six or ten things simultaneously? And if a few of them drop off along the way it’s not so devastating.” And so a Spanish doctor called in to remedy food poisoning ended up conveying a now long-held strategy of how to produce art. So I used to work on one painting until I finished it. The attitude with the Spanish, they had a large family, they lost a certain amount of them. “Being the spontaneous guy I was, I jumped up and grabbed him. “The doctor came to me and said, You’re still a young man, you can have many more,” Moses recalls. While living in Spain with his family, his two young sons came down with food poisoning. “I work on eight or ten paintings every day, moving from one to the other in different states of development.” Some artists work on a single picture and finish it before moving on, but not Moses. I say, Oh, yeah, that’s not bad, how can we extend that, or do I want to extend it? Am I satisfied with it? Or do I want to reactivate the surface?” I have them (the canvases) outside or I have them in the studio, and I bring my moving transportation and I look on the walls and see what I have. In short, “The next move I make is based on the last move I made.”Īs to how he gets started each morning, Moses says: “I look at what I’ve done the previous day. “I see something, it suggests something that suggests something (else), and they mutate ideas, place to place… I discover by chance, not with an idea, and what I discover is in the evidence that’s left on the canvas.” “Yeah, I’m very intuitive,” Moses replies. God created man, painters discover reality in the phenomenal world. I never have any goal intended, the goal is in the process. “I’m a researcher,” he says “I investigate through paint, and I discover through paint things that I mutate to the next episode. ![]() It never changes, my obsession.”Įd Moses is pretty clear about the art process, at least as it pertains to him. And is it still the same as maybe 60 years ago? “It’s always the same. As Saul Bellow once told Herbert Gold, “Don’t count any writer out while he’s still alive.” A couple of weeks before her death at age 93, June Wayne was showing off her Charlie Chaplin steps and telling me she still had other projects in mind.Īt 90, Ed Moses remains consumed by his art. One thing about artists, though, they don’t tend to retire. Last year LACMA gave him a show and right now there’s one through June 25 at the William Turner Gallery in Bergamot Station. art scene during the latter 1950s along with Billy Al Bengsten, John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz, and several others, many of whom have died or curtailed their creative output. He emerged as a viable presence in the L.A. this evening at the Manhattan Beach art Center.Įd Moses doesn’t need much of an introduction. Three individual painters, and yet a strong underlying bond is at the core of “Family Plot,” the Homeira Goldstein-curated exhibition that highlights recent work by Ed Moses, his son Andy Moses, and Andy’s wife Kelly Berg. ![]()
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