I Just Wait Until It Goes 'Pow!' (September 13 2012) I Just Wait Until It Goes ‘Pow!’ (September 13 2012)

Ed Moses the 86 year old American abstract painter considered one of the most innovative and central figures of postwar West Coast art has been interviewed by Alanna Martinez for Blouin Artinfo. During the interview Moses describe his painting practice as “It’s all sort of intuitive: arbitrary and intuitive and intermittent, in terms that I may choose one color to do everything. And if I don’t like it I hose it off, or the assistants scrape the paint off. Before it dries, I start introducing paint again in various methodologies of marking: pouring, foam brushing, making a crisscross pattern and not liking that, and hosing that off and then starting over. I work on about 8 to 10 paintings simultaneously. …Sometimes I’ll work on a painting over a couple of months, and sometimes I hit it right off the bat. When I do, what happens is at the end of the day, I drag the painting, kicking and screaming, into my studio, tilt it up along the walls. I have two viewing spaces; they’re about 20-by-30 to 40 feet long with 16-foot ceilings, and the lights are all on tracks. I use incandescent lights. I don’t like paintings lit by fluorescent lights. …The painting is the issue, not the environment in which the painting exists. Fluorescent light neutralizes. There’s no drama to it, there’s no romance. But that’s not a popular attitude at this particular point. People are more interested in ideas than the romance of painting. I’m still old-fashioned in that sense. I’ve been painting 50 or 60 years, so that has something to do with being still in that situation.”

 

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