At the age of 90th, Los Angeles is finally ready to recognize Ed Moses as one its most iconic painter

Ed Moses, portrait courtesy The West Hollywood life style magazine

Why it took so long for LA to recognize Ed Moses as important? Probably because he never painted the expected by Beatrice Chassepot, Los Angeles, October, 13th, 2016

All along his long 60 year career as a painter he just painted, meaning he just put color on a canvas trying to figure out how he would discover new combinations.

He never shown to the public any figurative story one would embrace and follow through. Ed Moses is all about series, experimental series, he would do until there’s nothing more to say. Then the curiosity or the frustration would lead him to jump to another series like a young child would jump on a hopscotch layout.

His gallerist in Santa Monica, William Turner, qualifies Moses as “A painter and “mutator”, whose allegiances have been to tireless experimentation rather than to the tenets of any one movement, Ed Moses has been honing a distinct visual vocabulary for over 60 years, obsessively mining the possibilities of abstraction”.

As a result of that diversity of vocabulary inherent to each series, no series resembles the other, in color, tone, shape or size. For the art market this is the most disturbing situation ever. How a gallerist can explain to a collector that his artist is changing so much that no one could recognize at first glance saying “this is a Moses”.

The other Ed from Venice, California, Ed Ruscha decided to go somewhere else to the concept as well as his fellow colleague John Baldessari. Conceptual art was more of a bet and it worked pretty well when Painting painting was burdened with all the weight of art history from Europe as well as the US. To find his own path was not an easy one. No matter for Ed Moses because what he likes the most is paint!

Luckily this is with time that everyone agree to salute a huge body of work. Happy Birthday Dear Master…