Forrest Moses

Forrest Lee, Jr. Moses (b.1934)

A passion for traveling and shooting landscape photography fuels the paintings and monotypes by Santa Fe-based artist Forrest Moses. Born 1934 in Virginia, he earned his BFA from Washington and Lee University in 1956 and served as a naval officer in the Philippines, Japan, and other Far East destinations, which had a strong visual and philosophical influence on him. He discovered art and architecture the year he spent in Europe and formalized his education in graduate school at Pratt Institute in New York. Moses designed interiors, furniture, and ceramics in Houston before turning to full-time painting. In 1965 he moved to the Monterey Peninsula in California, an area rich with rollicking hills, crashing waves, hushed forests, and a peaceful nature — perfect for his preferred isolation and routine. Painting became Moses’ exercise in contemplating of nature and unfolding truth by observation. His emphasis on land and sea teetered on their fragile line of meeting. Seeking a place in the sun, he relocated to Santa Fe, N.M., where he has been working since 1969. Moses’ resumé includes more than 40 solo exhibitions at galleries, universities, and museums in Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, Albuquerque, Austin, and abroad. He also has participated in numerous group and invitational shows, lectured and taught, and engaged in printmaking. Moses records with a camera and translates images into works in oil, monotype and watercolor. He is also well known for floral images of Iris and figure drawings. His recent landscape monotypes tap the same subject as the larger, more formal oil paintings. Looser in line and color, the monotypes are less objective but retain image identity. In this process, he brushes, pushes, wipes, scratches, thins, and otherwise manipulates etching ink on a Plexiglas plate and creates one unique image from each transfer of the ink to paper on a large etching press. Moses uses the monotype to interpret land images as well as flower and figure. All works are untitled. Moses’ work is held in private, public, and corporate collections worldwide.