(1934 - 2021)

A passion for traveling and shooting landscape photography fuels the paintings and monotypes of Santa Fe-based artist, Forrest Moses. Moses earned his BFA from Washington and Lee University in 1956. He served as a naval officer in the Philippines, Japan, and other Far East destinations, all of which had a strong visual and philosophical influence on him.

Forrest Moses discovered art and architecture during the year he spent in Europe and when he formalized his education in graduate school at Pratt Institute in New York. The artist 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 and hushed forests - a peaceful and idyllic natural environment perfect for his preferred isolation and routine.

Painting became Moses’ way of contemplating Nature and unfolding truth through observation. In his art, Moses' emphasis on land and sea focused 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, as well as internationally. The artist has also participated in numerous group and invitational shows, lectured and taught and practiced the art of printmaking.

Forrest Moses records with a camera and translates his images into works in oil, monotype and watercolor. He is well known for floral representations, particularly of the iris, as well as for his figure drawings. Moses' recent landscape monotypes tap the same subject as his larger, more formal oil paintings. Looser in line and color, the monotypes are less objective while still retaining image identity. In this process, the artist brushes, pushes, wipes, scratches, thins and otherwise manipulates etching ink on a plexiglass plate. He creates one unique image from each transfer of the ink to paper through a large etching press. Moses uses the monotype to interpret land, flower and figure. All works are untitled. His work is held in private, public and corporate collections worldwide.