Why does the practice of painting endure? An answer came to me last night as I walked through Roman Art from the Louvre at the Seattle Art Museum. The objects that stood out among the many tons of heavy white marble in the exhibition were the two or three vivid fragments of interior wall painting. Their rich, complex hues and fluid brushstrokes made them appear very much alive amidst the bleached-out statuary, like parrots in an ossuary.
The mostly small-scale works of Ben Frank Moss, on view through Sunday at Francine Seders, also reveal the enduring yet unassuming power of paint. Moss, a longtime faculty member at Dartmouth College, creates pieces that straddle the worlds of landscape and painterly abstraction, condensing the dramas of realism and human imagination into dynamic, minute fields. Such spatial reductions give his paintings a transformative energy, intensifying both form and color to create art that is at once minimalist and baroque.
There is an almost deceptive quality of looseness that characterizes these works. Broad swaths of thick paint appear to have been laid down casually with self-assured palette knife strokes. But within the raised planes of oils that collide and flow together over his surfaces, there is a three-dimensional articulation of light and color that is dazzling to behold. What might be a cloud, wave, or land mass crests and recedes, leaving behind spectrums of blue, red, cream, or yellow which merge or simply penetrate one another.
When working in ink, Moss eschews color for shades of black and makes use of the textural qualities of the paper on which it is applied. Emphasizing shape and line, these pieces are often as spare as the oils are dense. No less powerful than the paintings, they inhabit a completely different range of expression -- one that is more sober and contemplative.
In the upstairs gallery there are works by three artists who have had the pleasure of studying with Moss. Abstract painter Olivia Britt creates segmented and variously textured works in an unusual palette. Nanci Erskine uses botanical and floral imagery in her paintings to depict states of being that approach or withdraw. Sidney Dodge’s citrus-colored, mixed media drawings concern themselves with suggestive, almost surrealist forms. All demonstrate elements of Moss’s technique, but utilize it for radically different means.
