Forrest Moses

Forrest Moses was born in 1934, in Danville, Virginia. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree, major in fine arts, from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia in 1956 before joining the Navy. While in the service, Moses was stationed in the Philippines and had the opportunity to visit Japan, Guam, and Hong Kong. After leaving the navy, Moses spent a year traveling through Europe and experiencing the ‘art of history.’

Upon returning to the United States, Moses enrolled in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied architecture and design. The contemporary art scene of New York proved fascinating to Moses, and he became enthralled with the liveliness of the ever-evolving art world. It was during this time that Moses began painting and drawing in earnest.

In the early 1960s, Moses moved to Houston and worked as an architect before traveling further West to California. He lived and worked in San Francisco for a number of years while pursuing his painting career.

After another brief stint in Houston, Moses moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1969. Enchanted by the light and landscape, Moses lived and worked in Santa Fe.

Below description from LewAllenGalleries, Santa Fe website where Moses has been represented for most of his career:
For more than fifty years, Forrest Moses was known for painting graceful visual responses to place through distinctive and complex rhythms of color, line, and form that reveal the sudden transcendent quality of the simple experience of being in nature.

Establishing a dynamic tension between abstraction and representation, Forrest Moses’s masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke.

Profoundly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, Moses embraces the principle of wabi-sabi: the realization that things become more beautiful as they decay, age, and transition. In this way, the marks of his oil paintings and ink-based monotypes reference the practices and philosophies of sumi-e ink masters. During his career, Moses sought, in his words, “to discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.”

Throughout his career, Moses’ paintings and works on paper evoked a vision that strove beyond the literal, often inclining towards abstracted orchestrations of elegant color and line. As Pasatiempo art critic Michael Abatemarco wrote in 2019, “Essentially, [Moses’] paintings and monotypes are imagined landscapes not tied to any specific location. They are about mood and tone. But they conjure a feeling of place, often with a lightness of being.”

Forrest Moses was born in Danville, Virginia and was educated at Washington and Lee University and the Pratt Institute in New York. His work is included in numerous major private collections and in those of diverse public institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. His monograph, Forrest Moses, published by Kensho Editions in 2001 and printed in Verona, Italy, is an elegant, full color presentation of this artist’s unique contribution to modern landscape painting.