An Interview with Beatrice Moss

4/20/21

by Clio Thayer

 Tell me about your senior project.

My project is based on how we experience the world and how we don’t. It’s about boundaries and borders, the invisible and unknown. It came about as kind of a self-discovery for my own blockages. 

There were a lot of things that I thought that I knew about, but hadn’t fully realized yet, and my show is sort of about that realization of the invisible boundaries that I’ve set up for myself in my life and when I go out to experience things. I want to draw attention to those veils between us and experience.

For everybody, there’s a threshold to the unknown, and we don’t like to put ourselves outside of that. Even going outside of our comfort spaces, we still put up boundaries to experience. In the hopes of finding real, deep experience in our day-to-day life, I want people to be aware of those blockages, so that they can really truly immerse themselves in the moment and in what’s going on around them. 

There’s beauty in the mundane, light changes every day, paint slowly fades, trees grow. There’s so much to experience, even in what we already know. 

So I’m using frames within frames to create boundaries for people to step past. There’s the separation of the paintings from the wall, when they come out, there’s that boundary, then, within the borders of the canvas, there’s another frame, so the landscapes are set within the canvas. You have to go through again, and in some of them, trees come across the picture plane that block you from really immersing yourself in the landscape. 

The light colors, the light-on-light paintings, the glazes, thick application of paint, is all about leaning into the subjective quality of art. It’s always an interpretation of the world, it’s never the world as it is. Again, going back to experience, I want to lean into that idea that our experiences are always filtered: through our mind, through the lens of a camera, through a paintbrush, through writing. 

I want people to be aware of these boundaries and I want to invite them to step across. 

Are those typical themes for your art, or are these new for this project?

It’s new and old. My work has, for six years, been focusing on landscape and being out in nature, and being out in the world, and living through experiences, but it’s become more introspective. It’s become more about how the mind interacts with the landscape and interacts with the world, and, by extension, other people, in all aspects of our lives. Rather than just being somewhere, it’s become more psychological. It’s about more than just the beauty of a place, the beauty of a thing. 

It’s taking the same kind of themes, then twisting them and building on them. The landscape has always been something important to me. My family, when I was a little, we were always hiking, going camping, and my Mom is a botanist and landscape architect. My Dad studied microbiology and funguses. There’s a connection and appreciation to the natural world in my upbringing. That sort of naturally extended into my artwork, and it’s become more inward. My artwork has become more of a meditative a thing, a way of looking in on myself, rather than just trying to interpret what I see or where I am.

What type of art did you start off doing, and how did that take you to where you are now?

What type of art did I start doing? I started off by drawing Pokemon!

But, I guess, around High School is the time I actually started doing art, instead of just doing fan-art and copying other things. Landscape has always been what I’ve been attracted to. It’s become less technical, as I’ve worked, I strive less and less for realism and realistic effects. Realism is beautiful and impressive and wonderful on so many levels, but, to me, as I make art now, it’s, again, meditative. Introspective. I want to reflect the abstractions of the mind in my work. 

I did a lot of still-lifes when I started out, and up through sophomore year I was still doing some. Being in front of my subject, having the ability to directly experience what I am painting, has always been an important of what I do. I find that I can connect better to the painting that I’m making if I have some sort of frame of reference for the environment. The temperature of the room, or the way the forest smells. I don’t think those things actually come through in the paintings, but it gives me a background to build off of, and this greater inspiration to draw from. In a lot of ways, my work is kind of similar to how I started. I still work from life, I still do landscapes. But, it’s just kind of been about what I want to say with that. How I present the landscape is what’s changed. 

 What artists have inspired you and your work?

The big, kind-of famous person who has influenced my show is Mark Rothko, especially in his Chapel series. He talks about creating a space for people to sit down and reflect on the paintings, reflecting on themselves. That was something that I really wanted to not necessarily emulate, but work with and incorporate into my show, is for people to sit down and take their time with my work, to use my work as the stepping stone into their own thoughts, into their own internal monologue. So Rothko, in all of his simplicity and layers, faded edges and abstractions and all of that has been pretty inspirational.

David Grossmann has really wonderful, ethereal paintings of nature. There’s this one of a deer coming out of the woods, and it’s just so— scrubby? It’s like a ghost of an image. Not all of his work is quite like that.

Vladimir Weisberg is a still-life artist who does these white-on-white paintings of geometric objects. It’s in that same of vein of subtlety. I haven’t been able to find much about his work. He’s sort of obscure, in the English-speaking world at least. But they’re very calm pieces, very meditative, and much more subtle than my own work is. His work has been really impactful, and he was probably the artist that I saw that prompted me to go in this direction.

Russell Chatham, who I believe died recently, is an American landscape painter, who, in most of his work, was subtle. The landscapes are, well, they’re not abstract, but they’re sort abstracted into these blocks of colors and, again, it’s just simple, and meditative. There’s just a little bit of light peeking out over the horizon. That light has a spiritual quality to it. Light is associated with, I think in most cultures, gods and religious symbolism and that’s a feeling I get in the morning when the sun comes up and the light comes over the hills, and bathes everything in warmth. It’s just this spiritual experience that I haven’t found anywhere else. The spirituality of light has been especially impactful over the last year or two. 

What does your studio or workspace look like right now?

Oh, it’s a mess. It’s been more of a mess… but it’s been a lot neater. I’m working on a whole lot of paintings right now all at one time, waiting for things to dry, and so everyday there’s a new thing to work on with each painting. So, clutter has built up, because I don’t have the down time to organize things anymore. But at least the wall that I look at, that has all my paintings on it, I try to keep that simple and tidy, to try to not distract from the work. So there’s kind of two spaces going on. There’s my work table, which has brushes and paper and canvasses and vases and prints and gesso and all sorts of stuff hanging out on it, then there’s my little pristine wall that’s just white, with the paintings hung salon style all over it, and a couple of little color reference cards from the start of last semester. It’s not as clean as I would like it to be, but it never is.

No one’s ever is. Where do you want to go after you graduate? Professionally, that is.

I don’t know! That’s the short answer. 

The long answer is, I’m not really concerned where I go professionally from here. I’m going to keep making art, and the plan is to move around every couple of years, spend some time in a place I want to see, a place I want to experience, and make art about it! Make art about the journey, just continuing on this similar vein of work. Apply to some artist cooperatives, galleries, show work, hopefully sell work. I’m not too concerned with making a whole lot of money off my art or being super famous, or whatever the big artist people do, I’ve always made art because it’s been a way for me to express myself. The business side of it, the corporate side of it, didn’t really show up in my line of thinking until, like, god, the summer before Junior year here? It just wasn’t on my mind. 

Yeah, move around, make art, sell a couple of things. I don’t need much in the way of “things” to be happy, so I don’t strive to make more than I really need, or to have more than I really need. Good food, a roof over my head, and the ability to make art is just what I want from my life right now. Maybe that’ll change some day, maybe it won’t, and whatever. Wherever I go from here is fine with me. That’s in the future. I’m more concerned with enjoying life as it is, as it comes to me.

 How do you feel the community here at school has impacted your work, including peers, faculty, and staff?

It didn’t for a while. That’s not to say that I was isolated, I have a group of friends who I love dearly, and professors who I love dearly, but I was just kind of doing my own thing. It wasn’t probably until Junior year that I started thinking more about art and what it means to me and what I want to express, so it wasn’t until that point that I started drawing on various professors and friends. One of my friends, we’d go up into the White Mountains every weekend. That’s been a huge inspiration for me and my work. I get almost all of my imagery from various places out there. 

James Chase was the first professor here that really impacted my work. In his sculpture class, we were doing installation based projects, and we were talking about creating a space, an environment, a feeling in people and while I’m not working specifically with installation/sculpture based things, there’s definitely more use of space in my work and all of its abstract meanings and manifestations. Space and borders and between the paintings, the space you walk through to follow the succession of paintings. 

Tricia Gibbs has been hugely influential and helpful in developing my work. Her MFA feature was on the middle spaces and transitional spaces, so she introduced me to a whole bunch of artists that are really relevant to me. Visual artists and written artists. All of the professors, all of the students, they’ve all been hugely supportive here and hugely encouraging to keep on keeping on. I never, thank god, ran into any professors that said things like, “No! You have to do art my way, you have to do my subject matter!” They were always very accommodating. In a figure class, considering figure in the landscape, finding ways to incorporate the things that I love into their classes, so that I always had a chance to learn and grow, no matter what medium: sculpture, figure, writing, whatever the class. All of the professors have been hugely supportive in helping me find an artistic voice and different ways of expressing similar ideas.

What advice would you have for underclassmen or incoming freshmen?

School doesn’t make you successful. That’s true of any major, any degree. Schools give you the tools to then become successful. You only get out of school what you put in. Take every assignment, every opportunity, to push yourself, no matter what it is. Whether you think the assignment is wonderful, perfect, or whether you absolutely hate the prompt. Take it, run with it, push yourself technically, push yourself conceptually, because at the end of the day, that’s the only way that people improve: pushing beyond your abilities and taking the initiative to learn new things. Professors and classes and books can only teach you so much. You can only really learn by doing. Take every opportunity and run with it. Try not to get bogged down in everything coming down the pipe. Focus on what you have now and do your absolute best at whatever you have to deal with in the moment. School, personal, financial, whatever it is. Do your best in the moment, that’s all anybody can ask of you.