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Ben Frank Moss was born in Philadelphia in 1936. He studied at Whitworth College in
Spokane (B.A., 1959) and Boston University (M.F.A. 1963). Moss currently teaches at
Dartmouth College and has studios in both New Hampshire and Washington where he summers.
His work has been included in solo, group, and invitational shows
throughout the United States and abroad since the late 1960's. Moss is represented by several galleries on the
east coast, and his work has been included in shows at the Seders Gallery since 1967.
As a landscape painter, Moss works to establish a sense of
"place" in his work. He is a conscientious observer of light and space as shaped
by time and season and brings these observations to his work. In his small oil on paper
paintings, he uses color, form, and gesture to evoke memories of "place". |
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Artist’s Statement
My work is often generated out if a distant memory of a physical
setting that becomes a metaphor for a personal truth. As a child I had
the good fortune of woods, open fields and farmland in which to play.
When I was nine my father, who was a Presbyterian minister, took a
pastorate in Huntington, Long Island, on the north shore. It was in
the mid-nineteen forties, and
Huntington was still considered a village. It was a quite place of
natural beauty, and my imaginative life was very much centered on
continuing play in the woods as well as the added blessing of water.
When I was eighteen the family made another move to Denver, Colorado,
and I finished my college education in the Northwest. It was in the
west that I first encountered mountains on a grand scale. When I
returned to Boston for graduate study many hours were spent in
Lanesville, looking again out to sea.
Although the experience of nature as manifest in woods, water and
mountains was central to my childhood, I was not conscious of being
drawn back to it as a source for my work until we returned to the
Northwest in 1963. For ten years we lived on a farm that bridged the
Little Spokane River. It was from daily observing the silver light,
space and temperature transforming a pasture, grove of trees or the
run of water that I found myself preoccupied with the spirit and
grandeur of the place. Anticipating the time when we would have to
leave this remarkable setting, it seemed a given that we should try to
repeat the experience elsewhere. We searched for property and finally
located forty acres, fifty miles north of Spokane in the mountains. We
built by hand a studio/house and for the last thirty-six years we have
returned every summer to witness the beauty of a landscape that we
love, something like Wallace Stegner’s return from the West Coast to
summer in Vermont. The paintings and drawings, then, are built out of
extended exposure to what is seen and felt, trying to understand what
lies behind the appearance of the natural form. I work totally from
memory, with each piece developing on its own. The surprise of the
finished piece can recall a beach on Long Island Sound, an island in
the San Juans or a well-traveled road in the Northwest. At another
level it is clear that I am trying to hold / reflect the lost moment,
break through the fence of time and reclaim what
was given to me as a child on a first-time basis. At its best the
final statement conveys a distilled sensation of time.
Ben Frank Moss
December 2007
A version of this first appeared in The Artist as Native:
Reinventing Regionalism by Alan Gussow
Pomegranate Artbooks, Inc. San Francisco, Calif, 1993
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