Carol Moses is an artist who creates non-representational tableaus. She employs grids, patterns, repeated linear elements, and biomorphic forms, to create a distinctive visual vocabulary. Her often-sober titles belie lively compositions and dynamic use of color. Discrete styles namely calligraphic, gestural, and geometric appear throughout her omnivorous practice that moves between drawing, painting, printmaking and photography.
“The themes in my painting practice deal on a basic level with connection, relation, isolation, distance. The colors and forms resolve or enact forces and fitting connections. There is often a thought of composing a delicate balance between the parts of the image as they are accruing on the planar surface.”
In Moses’ oil paintings, oil stick on paper and canvas, color is employed compositionally throughout, as a means of creating balance and order. This technique is also similar to Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Simultanism which depicts ‘simultaneous contrast’, a means of describing the effect colors have on one another within an arrangement and their ability to produce a complex poetic language removed from formal concerns.
“In painting, I feel comfortable and free working in watercolor because it requires me to decide and act, and does not allow me to plan and re-do. My natural ‘logical’ thinking tendency is toward complexity, thinking and re-thinking; examining, editing, perpetual refinement. In watercolor, my work process is quite different – I am forced to commit, and go ahead. In this medium, I work more freely and confidently, without the intermediation of my intention, logic, analysis, etc. In oil, I also have a strong focus on composition, and I feel an affinity with the work of Wassily Kandinsky and of Paul Klee. Some work is completely geometric, but all of it works with order and balance, and communication among the colors and forms. “
Moses’ work represents a turn inward towards a mental landscape, a refusal of narrative and a freedom from a signature style. She provides the viewer with small, intimate interpretations of complex emotions and occurrences events (personal, biological, or historical) and translates them into color, form and essence. Her artistic work creates balance, moving through color and form to create a visual neologism all her own.
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