According to Moses

ED MOSES is looking for Picasso.

But as the 78-year-old painter makes his way through the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena on a recent Sunday, he is distracted by a Sam Francis painting. Scattered islands of translucent azure, mauve, purple, saffron and scarlet float at the top of the light-filled canvas.

“He had such a flair for color,” Moses says as he sits down on a bench facing the “Basel Mural I,” which covers an entire wall. “The forms sort of dance around and eventually they break open.”

Francis painted it vertically. In places, the colors run.

“All the things that broke out became part of the membrane or the webbing of the painting,” Moses says. “Not that he painted it, but it’s a byproduct of the act of putting the paint on that becomes part of the visual vocabulary.”

At first, “he wasn’t being cute with it.” But later, Moses says, when Francis started painting his canvases on the ground, it became a studied gesture.

On this day, Moses has agreed to come to the museum to look at and talk about a Picasso. Francis is a detour.

Moses too paints on the ground but outside so he can hose off the canvas. While the canvas is wet or drying, Moses draws on it, using rollers or ketchup bottles filled with paint.

There are no stories, just looping lines that splatter and dissolve: “Certainly the public likes a reference to their life. In an abstract painting, there can be sort of apparitional forms. In other words, you can find a bunny or a head. ‘Look at that bunny; look at that head.’ And they’re really happy because they can make a connection. I think there’s a tendency to be intimidated by something when it doesn’t have a reference. If it has a reference to nature, to mountains, clouds, people are more comfortable.”

As an abstract painter, Moses says, “I’m constantly confronting that, and shaking that, and of course, they become offended and insulted. ‘What am I to look at?’ ‘Just look!’ ‘Well, what do they mean?’ ‘They don’t mean anything.’ ”

His recent work as well as two older paintings go on view Nov. 20 at Bobbie Greenfield Gallery at Bergamot Station.

Moses was friendly with Francis, who died in 1994, and would often visit the studio Francis shared with Richard Diebenkorn in Santa Monica in the 1960s.

In front of “Basel Mural I,” Moses digresses, telling anecdotes about Diebenkorn’s fastidious work habits, relating an evening with Francis, Jasper Johns and Isamu Noguchi. (“We started making these word jokes: saying a word and then free-associating. And we sort of played the whole evening.”)

“Sam, anyway, had this huge painting that was laying out on the floor -- maybe 50 feet by 25 feet,” Moses says. “He painted the whole thing. Rolled it up and had it shipped to Berlin,” where it was unfurled and hung at the Nationalgalerie. “And that was the first time he saw it. That takes a lot of courage. Or confidence.”

In the early 1950s, Francis did a series of monochromatic paintings, often with a pigment-free edge at the bottom. Later, That light-filled space moved to the center, as in the diptych mural created from 1956 to 1958 for the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland.

“One of the big problems that an artist has is that he ends up making things that look like ‘art,’ and any guy worth his salt certainly doesn’t want to make ‘art.’ That’s a term that came from historians and writers. I like [painter Charles] Garabedian’s term: ‘artifacts.’ It’s not art. I don’t want to be no ... artist,” Moses says. “But I must say, I’m still hung up on the idea of making something grand and magnificent and formidable. But that’s my ego speaking.”

It starts with the paint

Like Francis, Moses seeks to abandon ego and intention. “I never liked the idea of being in control, but I like the idea of being connected to it, to be in tune with it, simpatico to the experience and the execution and the materials,” he says. “Sam didn’t have any intentions on this -- he just started putting the paint on. But he learned from the painting” as it evolved and mutated.

“He might slide to the left, or go in this direction, make them more vertical, make them denser, put more paint in or leave more space open,” he says. “That’s the most interesting part -- the discovery. Intentions don’t mean beans ... The evidence is there. The evidence is its reality, not what the artist intended it to be.”

Later, Moses quotes from “Picasso on Art,” Dore Ashton’s book of interviews with Pablo Picasso, which he has brought: “In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: Love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”

Unlike Francis, who rarely threw paintings away, “I always destroy my paintings if I don’t like them,” Moses says. “I have to paint like I’m a writer who puts paper in the typewriter and does two or three lines and rips it out and throws it in a corner. I do the same thing with canvases. If I make a false start, I toss it out.... Or I paint right on top of it, not looking. But sometimes, I see, ‘Oh boy, that looks good. I’d better leave that.’ And that’s cheating.

“You set up a situation and then you carry it out. If it doesn’t ring right, you can’t fix it. Because then you have a fixed painting, a white-out.... You don’t fiddle with it, you don’t try to get it to match. You don’t make it better.”

Artists are like siblings, competing for attention from parents, the world, Moses says, as he walks back through the galleries -- past Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti.

“If they pick you out, you’re really happy, but if they go to somebody else, you’ve been neglected. You haven’t gotten the attention that you’re due. So there’s that. And I think when we’re painting -- I know when I’m painting -- I always have ghosts on my back, different painters that I’m having a dialogue with.”

And who would they be?

“Oh, I’m not going to say,” he says, smiling, as he walks out into the sunshine.