LETTER TO THE VIEWER WHO HAS MORE TIME

The figure paintings in this exhibition are all perceptual works painted directly from life.  I have painted the figure for over forty years.  For the last ten years I have worked almost exclusively perceptually, that is from life.   Working “out of my head” has also been an important part of my process and one of my great joys but for the present I am completely taken with the excitement and possibilities of perceptual painting. 
Doing a painting “right on the spot” is very different from all other forms of painting, figurative or otherwise.   Nature stages a fascinating but an almost impossible  challenge.  Coping with the challenge IMMEDIATELY is a very tall order.  TIME is kept for the perceptual painter in a very different way -  the artist's time, the model's time and the time revealed in the painting.  The viewer needs to take the time to look at the painting.   When and if they do, they may feel the difference in the “on the spot”, “at the moment” perceptual painting.
  PERSONAL EXPRESSION presents another difficulty since the viewer’s experience of the supposedly familiar figure seems to be filtered through an almost tribal preconditioning which the public and the artist both share.  In terms of judging visual accomplishment within the perceptual figurative area, the artist must run through an even more difficult labyrinth of misunderstanding as the visually educated and confident judges of taste and “Zeitgeist” still suffer the same societal ambiguity.  Whether this ends in society’s eventual acceptance or rejection, the figure painter keeps working.  I do feel that the historians and critics have not pursued sufficiently the difference in the figurative art processes.  Perhaps you (the trusted viewer) and I should team up and put together a poignant and no doubt heavy literary work dealing with this. 
Considering how I have been working lately, I am tempted to title this exhibition "GOING TO THE WELL ONCE TOO OFTEN".  This is an old expression describing those compulsive individuals who can not leave well enough alone.  I have been doing this in my painting and it can be very painful (as well as paintful) to keep these paintings open past obvious stopping points in order to get something further.  So in the long run, I guess this exhibition is about PERFORMANCE, the risks and the rigors, trying to be in every stroke, every decision.  After so many years of painting, the dance goes on, the performance continues.  We are still trying to be the hero and perhaps ending up the fool.  You be the judge.

Paul Moscatt,  1999

A NOTE OF GRATITUDE
I owe a debt of gratitude to all my teachers especially Sidney Delevante, Karl Shrag, Nicholas Marsicano, Stefano Cusumano and Angelo Ippolito at Cooper Union and Bernard Chaet, Gabor Peterdi, William Bailey and Richard Zeimann at  Yale.  Also to fellow artists who I have shared studio time and space especially Mike Economos, Dan Dudrow, Churchill Davenport and Joe Giordano.   They have not only provided support but have given up valuable studio secrets (whether they wanted to or not). They and the rest of the faculty and art community especially students present and past make being an artist and teacher a full and worthwhile experience.