Ed Moses

I visited the studio of Ed Moses today with my Otis class. Ed is one of my all-time favorite painters, and it was exciting to have the opportunity to hear him talk about his process and his work.

One of the things I got from Ed is a feeling that I'm not alone in the way I work. Like me, he creates a lot of work in a short period of time. But not everything turns out good, and he throws away the ones that don't work out. I do that, too, but I kind of thought there was something wrong with that.

And like me, he gets bored with a style or a technique as soon as soon as he gets good at it. The challenge is gone, and it's the challenge that is interesting.

Ed said that his newest paintings never sell right away. He said it takes five years of showing a body of work before people become familiar with it and the work starts to sell. Then his collectors want him to keep doing the same paintings that they have become comfortable with, but Ed doesn't work that way. He continues to move forward, always changing his style, and always onto something different and new.

Ed paints seven days a week, starting at 7:30 every morning. This is the outdoor space where he does his large-scale paintings:



He has spider imagery painted everywhere, including this one he carved and painted into wet cement:



I've never seen spiders appear in his paintings, and I don't know what the spiders are about!