​About Robert R Moss AKA Ramos Ormandy

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I am a largely self-taught artist who was born in Australia but now live and work out of Vancouver and Sechelt, in British Columbia, Canada. Like a lot of artists, I still need a day job. 

 

I have studied painting and drawing in Australia and Glasgow, with Australian artists such as Anica Silva, Gary Shead and Bunty Houston.

 

“The best things cannot be said. The next best are misunderstood.” And, I would add, for the rest we have art. Once, in Bali, I saw a perfectly ordinary Balinese woman create a beautiful mini-sculpture out of folded palm leaves, incense and frangipani flowers. She gently placed the sculpture in a roadside shrine with a sense of the utmost devotion, but also with a naturalness and lack of self awareness that was completely unforgettable. I thought: this woman is an artist and yet she doesn't even know it. But maybe that's the natural state for all of us. She showed me a vision in which spirituality and the creative process can be utterly inter-meshed, the one with the other.Visions of the mythic and the sacred appear as frequent leitmotifs in my art. I am interested in the Aboriginal conception of maps as representations of a geographical forms but also metaphors for the spiritual journey. Maps of journeys in time, space and memory are persisting themes in my work. So often in nature, boundary zones are places rich in complexity, life and beauty. My works occupy the boundary zone between the abstract and the representational, moving between the one and the other, distorting scales and distances and playing with the fractal notion of recurring elements. Many of my paintings are informed by the Daoist tradition of the close investigation of nature, and for this reason, I am influenced by Chinese art, Tibetan Thanka painting and Japanese woodblock print making. Accordingly, I spend an inordinate time looking at clouds, trees and rocks. This drives my kids crazy.

 

That said, I am always keen to explore new directions. A couple of scuptures/installations, a large political/satirical piece and some portraits are in the planning process. Humour and satire most definitely a place in art, as they do in life, particularly when they prick the inflated egos of artists, leaders, messiahs. Keep you posted.