Amanda Quinn Olivar speaks with Andy Moses for CURATOR

Andy Moses & Geomorphology 1707, photograph courtesy Alan Shaffer

AMANDA QUINN OLIVAR:  I remember going to one of your earliest LA exhibits, with the rock paintings. When were you first inspired by nature?  Has your art continued to revolve around it?

ANDY MOSES:  Nature continues to be my first and main source for inspiration in my painting. I have always been interested in trying to capture that feeling of being alive. When you immerse yourself in nature you feel alive. The rock paintings you mention are from a show I had in 1988 at Asher Faure Gallery. Brian Butler, who now owns gallery 1301PE, was actually their director at that time, at Betty and Patty’s space on Almont Street. Your mother and father, Joan and Jack, actually bought two rock paintings before that exhibition in either 1986 or 1987. 

AQO:  Have other themes resonated throughout your career? Talk about the importance of form, energy and structure…

AM:  Those are all great questions. Form, energy, and structure are what my work is very much about. I feel  that form is essential to all painting. You create form in some sense within the picture field, but I’m also interested in the overall form or structure of what a painting of mine is and how that relates to form in general. In this recent exhibition at William Turner Gallery, each painting is one of three geometric forms: circular (which I refer to as tondos), hexagonal, or concave rectangles. In the tondos and hexagons, the form is emerging out of the center and the exterior form is defined by that emergence from the center. The panoramas are different. The overall composition is a little more conventional in that it is describing a pictorial landscape, or as I like to think of them, earthscapes. The earthscape being a little less like traditional landscape forms and a little more like an imagined form of some part of the earth. I am interested in this dance between pure abstraction and the suggestion of forms from the natural world. These concave curved rectangles come out of gestural abstraction but they do become pictorial, but of something that is in motion...