Carol Moses

painting, drawing

studio : 6 Vernon Stree, #22
email : carol@carolmoses.com
mailbox : 317
website : carolmoses.com
Instagram : @studio213art

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statement

I am a mostly 2D artist creating non-representational tableaus. Grids, patterns, repeated linear elements, and biomorphic forms create a distinctive visual vocabulary. Discrete styles namely calligraphic, gestural, and geometric appear throughout my practice that moves between drawing, painting, printmaking and photography.

My watercolors, modest in scale, are said to recall Helen Frankenthaler’s canvases in their methodology, and concentration on a centralized mass often foregrounding white space or emptiness. But, whereas Frankenthaler's expansive canvases often conjure landscapes, my tightly composed images create intimacy, evoking interiority. My work is a means of externalizing an internal state. This ability to transcribe sentiments which are at once subjective and objective is one of the qualities that makes these works both evocative, and universally legible.

Some of the gestural and expressionist qualities evoked by the Abstract Expressionists can be seen in my oil paintings which tend to move outward, employing a more allover compositional strategy. As well as the watercolors, they recall the work of Expressionist painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, using color and shape to create rhythm and balance, prizing stillness over movement, contemplation over emotion. In my oil paintings on paper and canvas, color is employed compositionally throughout, as a means of creating balance and order.

In recent years I have made series of photo portraits with interviews. A series includes portrait photography accompanied by a printed text, edited from an interview with the subject, using my own fixed set of questions. This work arises from a deep interest in human beings as individuals and as part of a group. I create a rich impression of the person at that time, and in that context with me. I am moved by a desire to know, preserve, and present, interesting human beings whom I am in contact with, in my life era. The concept for a photographic record of my contemporaries was partially inspired by the work of Felix Nadar. The interview questions were created by me to help us know ourselves and each other.