Recent Acquisitions: A Gift of Nine Works by Ben Frank Moss

Posted on September 01, 2009 by Kristin Swan

Hood Quarterly, autumn/winter 2009-10

At the close of the Hood Museum of Art's recent exhibition Immanence and Revelation: The Art of Ben Frank Moss, the artist and several members of his family generously donated nine paintings and drawings that had been featured in the exhibition and complement the five works by Moss already in the collection. Ben Frank Moss served as chairman of the Studio Art Department at Dartmouth College from 1988 to 1994, and from 1993 as the George Frederick Jewett Professor of Studio Art. He has acted as visiting artist or lecturer at over seventy institutions and has had more than sixty solo exhibitions.

Whereas Moss's early works centered on the figure and still life, in more recent decades he has focused almost entirely on landscape. His compositions are often inspired by the deep space of the Pacific Northwest, where he spends summers. Rather than painting on site or from photographs, he draws from memory and imagination to creating his lush, painterly works. As Moss has said of his landscapes, in which no figures are present and rarely even a building appears, he is "reaching for an absolute, a paradise of perfection, an ideal—these paintings are about that kind of possibility of the Kingdom on Earth."

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Written September 01, 2009 by Kristin Swan