STATEMENT
I don't know that there are words that explain what is present. I know when it all started it was a course offering in college. Right from the outset I discovered what it was like to stand alone in the studio and in silence be confronted with a blank white space. It was like wakeful dreaming, a return to childhood. I experience being blindfolded, walking backwards into a darkened room. It was both joyful and frightening but always a welcomed test with time standing still. This reward has been on going for over forty years.

What you see here is my brush with the claim of light. It's like closing-in on an experience of standing in zero where two opposites are in perfect balance. I don't claim that I get this state in every work but that is the secret desire. The landscape has become the environment where this challenge takes place. All of this work is generated from memory as opposed to having a reference present. From an initial mark it grows and becomes what it's supposed to be. One work generates another and from these opposites a series evolves. If it is really successful, the tension represents a reaching for becoming. A critic of the work once said that it was about the "in between." It is true that often the appearance held in the final state suggest reaching for complication. This is something I identify with from the hand of artists I admire.

In every studio I have occupied I have posted the following:

"Angle of God my guardian dear. To whom God's love commits me here, ever this day/night, be at my side to light and guard, to rule and guide." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Nature is a haunted house – but art is a house that tries to be haunted." - Emily Dickenson

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek is to discover, through the detours of art, these two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." - Camus

I want to thank you for coming and hopefully you will take away something that will nourish your spirit.

Ben Frank Moss
September 18, 2018