Moses, the Art Giver : As MOCA prepares a retrospective on the 70-year-old painter, Ed Moses says he still battles terror to create his works.

‘I think one of the most powerful motivating factors is fear of public humiliation,” Ed Moses says, sliding back in his chair and sipping a cup of tea at his home in Venice. A consummate schmoozer who’s generous with his thoughts about the absurdity of life, his private terrors and the perils of being a rather old-fashioned painter, the 70-year-old artist is musing about his upcoming retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951-1996,” opening next Sunday, will survey his artistic development in about 60 works. And as retrospectives generally do, this one will put the artist in a spotlight--simultaneously expanding his audience and inviting critical assessments of his work.

On view will be a juicy array of abstract drawings and paintings by a spiritual descendant of the Abstract Expressionists who revels in sensuous materials--splats of thick paint, washes of thinned pigment, ridges of tape, cut edges of paper, textures of canvas. Labor-intensive and loaded with visual nuances, his work encompasses a wide range of formats--from crisp cutouts, relatively precise diagonal grids and solid-color panels to loose, gestural paintings, some of which contain evocative images.

According to MOCA’s exhibition coordinator, Alma Ruiz, Moses “typifies a rare breed of artist today who experiments extensively. It’s amazing to me that after all these years he is still very devoted to painting. It is still a struggle for him, and he seems to welcome the struggle. His work is constantly changing. He is not afraid of doing things that look different.”

For Moses, the prospect of the show is intimidating, but the process of organizing it with guest curator John Yau and Ruiz has been interesting.

“At times I think, ‘Do I really need this?’ And of course my friends all say, ‘Yes. It’s important.’ But it’s complicated,” he says.

“I’m curious to see it all laid out. The hard part is getting the work [from collections] and figuring out what to show. Do you hang the ones that make an academic point or look good on walls, or the magic ones that don’t come together? Then there’s the issue of [arranging the work in] different compartments. Individual rooms will represent the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s a bizarre kind of thing. There’s a kind of madness that’s involved in all this. I’m sure that I’m completely mad at this moment.”

Seated in a light-filled room that opens onto the long frontyard of the woodsy complex where he lives and works, Moses appears entirely sane. What’s making him a little crazy beneath the surface is the self-imposed pressure of turning out massive new paintings for MOCA’s J. Paul Getty Trust Gallery, a pristine space with a soaring skylight that will serve as a dramatic point of entry for his exhibition.

“Having this room is incredibly exciting to me,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to do large paintings that have nothing to do with finances. They are expensive to make. But no one is going to sell them. No one is going to buy them. If the museum takes one or two of them, they are welcome, but I don’t know whether they will or not. That will depend on the curators.” The offer is a promised addition to his gift last December of 11 paintings and drawings, which have joined three major Moses works already in the museum’s collection.

He started the big paintings more than six months ago, working outside his barn-like studio on concrete slabs, where he leans over the horizontal canvases, applying and scraping off vast rivers of paint. The plan for each work was to juxtapose two or more 12-foot-high panels, each measuring 8 or 9 feet wide. But initial results were disastrous.

“I tried some large canvases right off the bat and I just didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even know how to begin,” he says.

In desperation, he shifted to a smaller format for three months until things got rolling, then returned to larger canvases and immediately got stuck again.

“When I went to do the big ones, it was a whole other ballgame,” he says. “Nothing happened for two months, and time was running out. Terror really struck. My stomach just tied into knots.”

About a month before Moses was scheduled to deliver the paintings to the museum, he was on a roll with 10 panels painted--a few of which he liked or thought had possibilities. But he had abandoned his usual morning routine of riding an exercise bike, meditation and loosening up his back in a Jacuzzi so that he could start painting at 7:30 a.m.

“Lifting these hundred-pound panels around has been hell on my back,” he says. “But I just say, ‘Back, I cannot tolerate for you to go bad. You just have to hang in there because this is what we are doing. We’re doing this thing together.’ ”

By Moses’ description, making the big paintings for MOCA is high drama, but it’s merely an intensified, high-stakes version of his usual mode of operation. The very antithesis of artists who have their work fabricated by technicians, he is thoroughly engaged in hands-on work that is propelled by a magical, internal force. And he seems to thrive on a perception of danger.

He attributes his approach, in part, to Buddhist philosophy, which has helped him give up a certain amount of control and leave himself open to discovery.

“I don’t make paintings, I find paintings,” Moses says. “I spend a lot of hours on repetitious activity, but every once in a while it’s like the old idea of slipping on a banana peel, and you are upended. That’s when something slides through that I could not have done. I don’t want to do paintings that I can do.”

Describing himself as obsessed but not disciplined, Moses says he aspires to a condition of free falling or flying in his work. He typically embarks on a new series by looking for a track--what Buddhists would call a path--that provides a loose sense of direction.

“There’s some vague thing I’m shooting for, but I don’t know exactly how it’s going to come about. So I try one thing and then another, and in this process once in a while something falls in the cracks. It might be on the reverse side of a canvas I’ve painted, or it could be something that happens on the concrete that gives me a toehold, the beginning of a vocabulary to pursue. But that can take three or four months.

“Once I decide to paint for an exhibition, in this case for a museum exhibition, it’s like circling the beast for a while. I look at the canvases and I buy paint. I roll the canvases out and I stretch them up on panels and go through a number of processes warming up. But the water is always too cold or too hot, so there’s a lot of resistance and a lot of inertia that takes place,” he says.

“Eventually I get in. Then the only discipline that might take place is making myself go out there [to the studio]. As time gets closer to curtain call, I start getting more and more anxious and more nervous. I say to myself, ‘Why did I ever do this? I don’t want to do this. There must be a lot of things I could be doing other than this. How about driving a cab?’ ”

But Moses always goes back to making art. Terror and angst are natural afflictions, he says. What matters is how you deal with them.

“For me it gets harder,” he says. “Each new thing is more difficult, and each time I hit the wall, I say, ‘That’s it. The deities or the genies are not going to come down and kiss my lips.’ ”

Moses was born in Long Beach in 1926, the son of a Portuguese mother, Oliva Branco, who had resided in Hawaii with her Scottish and English husband, Alphonsus Lemuel Moses. The couple separated when Oliva was pregnant with Ed, and she came to Southern California.

“I was never a student,” says Moses, who claims he couldn’t read until he was 14. One reason is that he was out of school for two years, when he was 8 and 9, while recovering from tuberculosis. “While other people were reading, I spent my youth listening to soap operas, drawing with crayons and working jigsaw puzzles,” he says.

When asked about his career aspirations, he would say he wanted to be a doctor. “That was something that was sort of lofty and seemed important. You were doing things for people, saving lives and all that stuff,” he says. But he dropped out of high school after a year and a half and joined the Navy. The closest he came to a medical profession was working as a surgical technician in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 and taking premed classes at Long Beach Junior College after he returned to civilian life.

He took his first art class at Long Beach with Pedro Miller, who was noted for his eccentric behavior and bohemian style, then transferred to UCLA in 1949 to study art. Quitting school several times and working various odd jobs, Moses finally graduated in 1956 and received his master of arts degree in 1958. At that point he painted in an Abstract Expressionist style reminiscent of Arshile Gorky’s work. In something of a coup, Moses’ graduate exhibition was staged in 1958 at the Ferus Gallery, a seminal contemporary art showcase on La Cienega Boulevard, founded by curator Walter Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz. But Moses was restless, so he headed for San Francisco and after a few months moved on to New York. In 1960, he returned to the West Coast, first living in San Francisco but later settling in Los Angeles.

Moses has been a prominent fixture on the local scene since the 1970s, compiling an impressive exhibition record in prestigious galleries and showing his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and UCLA’s Frederick S. Wight Gallery. But--unlike some of his peers at the Ferus Gallery, including Edward Ruscha, John Altoon, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston and Kienholz--he has never developed a signature style.

“In the early ‘70s I did these resin paintings, and I remember it was like a coming-out party,” he says. “I was part of a group of artists, but I [had been] the least public in terms of exhibitions. But when I did those paintings, everybody wanted them. I was really involved with them for two years, but I couldn’t make a business out of them. It’s not for any moral or ethical reason. It’s just that they no longer interested me.

“I realize that for a professional artist being emblematic or having a signature style is important. But I don’t consider myself a professional artist,” he says. “That’s someone who is responsible to the fact that this is a business enterprise. Someone who asks, ‘What are my costs? What are my revenues? Who is my audience? Is this going to be acceptable to the audience?’ I always had this dumb idea that you are the visionary for the audience. You open their possibilities. You certainly don’t introduce your own thoughts, but you can introduce your discoveries.”

After four decades of work, Moses has come to believe that there are two kinds of painting: “One is a very solid, located, firm-footed painting that doesn’t have to do with adjustments or improvisations. You just put the facts down.” As with Brice Marden and Robert Ryman, whom he reveres. And Richard Serra, who is known primarily as a sculptor.

“I admire Serra’s work, but he’s earthbound,” Moses says. “He believes in weight and density. I’ve been interested in that, but I finally realized that I would like to see if I can fly, if I could get airborne. I’ve just never been smart enough or inventive enough or lucky enough to get them off, but they’re always in process. And in that process there’s this little gap, the surprise spot. That’s what interests me.”

* “Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951-1996,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Next Sunday through Aug. 11. (213) 626-6222.