Geoffrey Moss

My art is about drawing. It is as direct as writing my name. Over the years my work has straddled a line between representational references and a more comfortable place — abstracting and rearranging my memory of what things looked like.

During my working process, shapes become my lexicon, routinely reduced, placed to ultimately explore the interaction of color; masses of paint becoming the raison d’etre for why I paint. As a working artist, if I am to be categorized at all, I would define myself as a “colorist,” ultimately exploring how paint documents spontaneous movement to communicate the sum reference of a completed personal dialogue. There is a deliberate historical “Americanism” in what I do, not only of centering elements most important to me on a canvas, but also of sustaining a critical awareness of audible silence.

My visual vocabulary allows the privilege to articulate the anatomy of everything I’m curious about: restrictions of the Bauhaus with an intrusion of Russian Constructivism, Chinese medicine labels, religious symbols, vintage comic book colors, 18th C. Japanese Shunga prints and eight years an art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All feeding my compulsion to paint, draw and continue the dance.