“In college, I did a term paper,” says Ed Moses. “I went out and researched the subject and wrote little notes on all the ideas that intrigued me. I would read the first and last paragraphs of every chapter. Every once in a while if I got interested, I would go back and read in between, but most of the time I just poked around, collecting little gems and little cuts. I wrote them down and laid them all out flat on the floor. Then I took little pieces of paper and wrote little connectors or arrows from one thought to the next thought. The teacher gave me an ‘A’ for effort but an ‘F’ for the paper because I didn’t do it properly. I didn’t follow directions. It’s the story of my fucking life.”

In many ways, this story says it all. Moses has never followed the rules — personally or professionally. Instead, he has pushed his art in unconventional directions, constantly mutating, as he likes to call it. Moses and his famous temper have often derailed his career, and his paintings — like his thoughts — seem to explode out of nowhere. It’s not until you get to the punch line when you realize that, in a typically Moses kind of way, it all makes sense. Despite his insistence to the contrary, Moses was one of the best painters to come out of Los Angles in the early 1960s. His name is on the short list with the likes of Ed Ruscha, Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, and Billy Al Bengston – all icons of the era.

Today, at 81 years old, Moses’ full head of hair and signature beard are a silvery gray, but he has lost nothing of the macho aggressiveness he was famous for in his younger years. The quintessential bad boy artist, Moses can turn on the charm when he wants to, but there is always an underlying tension. A conversation with Moses is like an intellectual tennis match with ideas being batted back and forth with increasing intensity and speed. He seems to like the game. Age hasn’t mellowed him much. He still gets mad, he still challenges, still flirts with the ladies whenever he gets the chance, and perhaps most importantly for him, still paints everyday. The one place he can sometimes find peace is an uneasy respite from the demons that torment the person but fuel the artist.

Moses’ home and adjacent studio are tucked away on a quiet residential block in Venice, just far enough away from the craziness of the beach to offer a little privacy, but close enough to the action to stay plugged in. Venice is home to a number of great artists and it’s hard to imagine Moses anyplace else. He was born in Long Beach, and minus a few short stints in New York, he has always lived in Southern California. The weather is a plus because Moses always paints outside. Large canvases – about a half dozen at a time — are laid out on the ground or on old paint-splattered sawhorses. Moses works on the flat horizontal surfaces, pushing and pulling paint across the canvas with a variety of tools: squeegees, mops, sponges, squirt bottles and his hands — but rarely a brush. “Painting is a kind of a visceral experience,” he says, comparing it to sex. “Painting is not making love by any stretch of the imagination, but it does have certain sensual characteristics. It has color and it has touch.”

Although the creative process is deliberate, nothing is preconceived. When he starts, he doesn’t know where he will end up. He lives with uncertainty. “For a long time, I did one painting at a time but if I lost it I wanted to kill myself. Total failure,” he says. “Most of the time I would lose a painting because it wasn’t perfect. Then I finally realized that is the nature of life: we’re imperfect. Now if a painting is real, if it has this energy field, if it’s something I respond to, I leave it alone.”

Moses’ indoor studio is more of a personal gallery than working space. There, he hangs the work vertically for the first time, giving him a completely new perspective. His latest work includes large canvases marked with imprecise but orderly streaks of color. These are interrupted by spreading shapes – sometimes subtle in color and sometimes in-your-face vibrant, but always showing how order and chaos can share the same canvas.

When paired, as Moses has done in his studio, they become quite epic. Measuring as large as 11 feet across and nine feet tall, some of the duel panels work in quiet harmony, while others create more conflict and tension. They are rich and deep and very different from recent works that some critics have labeled decorative. But make no mistake: these paintings are not in response to those critics. Moses would never give them the satisfaction. For him, painting is personal – a way to justify his own existence.

“I think there is something primal about it (painting),” he says. “It goes way back to the first tribes and clans. They discovered they existed by seeing a handprint on a wall, their reflection in a pond, or a footprint in the sand. If they scratched or put something on the wall they saw evidence that they exist. Kilroy was a character during World War II. He had a smooth head with two eyes, and a nose that came down and two hands underneath. Soldiers would leave the mark all over Asia and Europe with the caption ‘Kilroy was here.’ And I said, ‘Yeah! That’s what we all are doing — we are all being Kilroy.’ Kilroy was here, he left this mark. We are leaving marks or evidence that we exist.”

The experts will take it a step further. Frances Colpitt has followed Moses’ career since he was a young painter and she was working on her graduate degree at USC. She now heads up the art department at Texas Christian University and is the leading authority on Ed Moses. “There is always a construction to an Ed Moses painting,” she says. “There is no accident or chaos. There is always an authenticity of touch. It’s always there. His mark is always there.” She says Moses will be remembered as one of the great painters to come out of the L.A. art scene of the early 1960s.

It was an intoxicating time. La Cienega Blvd. and the legendary Ferus Gallery were at the center of a cultural revolution. The offices of the then-fledgling magazine ArtForum occupied the second floor above the gallery. A group of young and brash artists dominated the scene, living more like rock stars than creative hermits. Walter Hopps and Irving Bloom, two guys who had a knack for pegging the next big thing, ran the Ferus. They gave Andy Warhol his first a solo show. But before that, they championed a group of 14 young artists on the West Coast – seven from San Francisco and seven from Los Angles. Ed Moses had his first solo show at the Ferus in 1958, right out of graduate school.

To this day, Moses is blown away by the guys he hung out with back then. “The great part was I was in the mix,” he says, “and whatever reputation I have now was based on that, because now they are getting all this recognition and I was one of the characters in this group. “(Robert) Rauschenberg and (Jasper) Johns, they just came out of the blocks and did amazing stuff, pop, pop, pop,” he says, snapping his fingers. “They were geniuses. I ain’t one of those. I’m not a genius.”

Humble. Another word not always associated with Moses. But it is all part of the contradiction that is this artist. He can be aggressive, charming, arrogant and — yes — humble all within a few seconds. When confronted with that, he just laughs. “I’m a pack of lies,” he says. “A contradiction? I think that’s the truth. It’s part of living on the edge. It’s not that I like it. I’m terrified that I’m going to fall off into the abyss. I have dreams where ghosties come in and I’ll wake up and they are right there with me. That’s when I hate to be alone. It’s always been that way, for as long as I can remember. I’m not afraid of anything. I’m terrified of everything.” This insecurity is the flip side of his famous fuck-you attitude. But both seem to be necessary, allowing him to create the contradictions on canvas.

As a child he wasn’t inclined toward art at all. One of the three kids, he was raised in Long Beach by a single mother. When he was eight, his mother took him out of school for two years because she was afraid he’d get tuberculosis. When Ed did get back to the classroom, he was behind — especially in reading. He remained an average student and dropped out of high school after three semesters. “When I was young, I was a mess, flopping around like a fool,” he says.

He found some footing when he joined the Navy, where he worked as a surgical technician. That experience got him thinking about a career in medicine, so after his two-year tour he started taking pre-med classes at Long Beach Community College. His career path changed when he met a character named Pedro Miller, an eccentric art teacher who didn’t exactly fit into the mainstream. Moses felt he had finally met a kindred spirit, and discovered a talent for art at the same time.

Moses transferred to UCLA, but it would take him seven years to earn his degree. He quit school several times and compiled an impressively eclectic resumé in the process. He drove a cab. He worked as a lifeguard in Las Vegas, on a sardine boat, in a donut shop and as a technical draftsman, which would actually influence some of his earliest work.
Finally, he earned his degree in 1956. Two years later he got his Masters of Fine Arts, also from UCLA. After graduation, Moses moved to San Francisco and New York for short periods. He put himself in the middle of the artistic firestorm in both cities and soaked it all in, meeting and hanging with some of the greatest artists of the era: Hassel Smith, Frank Lobdell, Clyfford Stills, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jasper Johns.
Moses was in the thick of things for about a year, but never felt comfortable, so he came home to Southern California.

Moses’ work has gone through a number of radical transformations over the years. For his earliest tempera and crayon pieces, the artist drew on his experience as a draftsman to create geometric — but still realistic — interpretations of Southern California loneliness and isolation. By the late 1950s, the exactness of those geometric shapes had given way to a graffiti-like style that was linear and stark, and filled with sexual imagery. Moses experimented with collage and other mediums, before moving into a more traditional abstract expressionist arena with precise paintings relying on repetition and a diagonal grid. “I wanted to be in control. I thought that was the point,” Moses says.

But in the 1980s, something changed in a big way. Precision gave way to unpredictability. The grid almost seemed to explode from the inside out. His subsequent paintings are lighter and looser. They look as if a snail, dipped in paint, wandered across the canvas without any definite destination in mind. “I wanted to play in chaos,” Moses explains. “You can’t fight it, you can’t control it, you can systematize it, and you can’t interpret it or integrate it. I like that idea of transformation, though. (I liked) the idea that an energy field instigated by self-doubt can be transforming.”

Throughout his career, Moses has refused to embrace a signature style, which has probably cost him in terms of recognition and money. Over the years, he has gone through a series of “mutations” and continues to evolve to this day. Putting it bluntly, Moses paints whatever he damn well feels like painting, without regard to commercial viability, and he makes no apologies. “Professional artists get caught in the fact that they are a slogan, a commodity,” he says. “They do the same thing over and over again; they just get better at it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to get better. I’m not trying to make a better wheel. I like to find stuff that makes me go ‘WOW!’”

And that’s what he does every day as he heads out to the concrete patio between his house and studio. Moses is looking for the high – the precious moment when he is in the zone, and nothing else matters. “I really like it. It’s better than anything else I can do,” he says. “I like to go to movies and hang out with friends, but this is the real thing. Still, it fluctuates between me having a great time and really seeing the black of the black hole — the eye of the wolf. He’s always there, holding onto the back of my brain like some crab.” This is his world – a struggle to stay on the sane side of the line. Painting helps him do it.

As for personal conduct, Moses does have a few regrets. He admits to sabotaging his career at every turn, and there are stories of a bitter fight with a gallery owner leading to the cancellation of an important show, collectors thrown out of his studio over some perceived slight, and nasty arguments even with friends. “I think I have Tourettes Syndrome,” he says. “If I’m in a situation and I don’t like what’s going down, I just blurt it out aggressively (and) without decorum, without sensibility or sensitivity. Then I tell myself they deserved it. But then there’s another part of me that says, ‘Geez, that was not a nice thing.’ I always want to be gracious. I admire people who are gracious. That’s the kind of person I am. I am made up of these contradictions. Now the question: Is there any way to have an adventure with this? I try — in a fairly limited scope of canvas and paint.”

Moses has spent a lifetime confounding critics and living life on his own terms. For sure, it gets him into trouble sometimes, but it has allowed him to create an impressive and diverse body of work. Underneath his tough-guy façade, he is also generous with his time, talent, and money — especially when it comes to young artists. He often stages shows with his assistants. His reputation brings in the people, and he’s well known for showing up at many opening where a name helps create the buzz necessary for any young painter trying to get established.

Moses is a fixture in Venice, a town known for its art and its shenanigans, which is a good combination for a man like Moses. Sitting in his cluttered kitchen, he strokes his scruffy beard and makes eye contact, and for a moment looks like he’s the lead character in some grand Shakespearean production. Whether it’s a comedy or tragedy is the big question. Maybe it’s both.

“Happy? No! The last fucking thing in the world I want to be is happy,” he says. “Engaged? Yes. I like discovery. I like the spark of engagement. But happy? No, never.”

Written by: Erin Clark

Artworks Magazine: Spring 2008