Nature's Truth
Perspectives from The Artist's Road
One of our favorite contemporary landscape painters is the late Forrest Moses, a Santa Fe artist whose work is collected internationally. He used his experiences in nature to create abstracted compositions which clearly refer to their subject, yet contain a deeper, meditative reflection on nature.
In the translation from nature to canvas, he sought to “discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.” One might say that he created a new archetype for nature and our experience of it, one that we instantly recognize and accept as standing in for the thing itself.
Moses was a master of distilling down his experience with nature to its essence, and his canvasses gain great power and authority by that process. By limiting his subject to only what he felt was important, we are encouraged to become involved with his paintings in a new way.
By suggesting the forms of nature rather t…