Ed Moses, a celebrated American painter born in Long Beach in 1926, appeared for a panel discussion after a screening of the documentary – “The Cool School” – recently at the CineVegas Film Festival.

The Cool School documented the scene at the legendary Ferus Gallery which exhibited  a handful of  artists who rose up from the dynamic Los Angeles art scene to become a few of the most celebrated artists in America.

Festival organizers promised that the “Cool School” will provide a solid foundation from which to fathom the distinctive creative ”style” conjured up by the legendary gallery artists.

Ed Moses has savored a fifty-year career as a noted non-objective and abstract artist.

He first unveiled his work in 1949 and was part of the original group of artists from the Ferus Gallery who exhibited their work in 1957.

Later, Moses’s career was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996.

“I’m a painter, inventive, activated. An abstract painting is not a reference; it’s not a picture; it’s a perception of the painting. It goes back to Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?”

Art historians have argued that his paintings are important for a myriad of reasons.

A number of film buffs at the CineVegas Film Festival were quite surprised to happen across the unassuming Moses – an easy-going kindly gent – as he mixed and mingled in the lounge  at the popular Palms Hotel.

In part, his style is made recognizable by virtue of the fact he seldom uses a brush – instead – preferring to stain, knife, splash and facilitate tape and snap lines to achieve straight lines.

He is also known for a series of coastal architectural drawings.

For the most part, the innovative painter was inclined to exhaustively experiment with his materials.

In fact, Moses has been critically acclaimed for his bold composition and innovation.

In his senior years, he remains a high-profile fixture on the Los Angeles art scene,  and is respected for his inventiveness as an artist and his attentiveness to new developments in contemporary art.

The artwork of Ed Moses has appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world.

His coveted pieces are housed in prestigious collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Catch him if you can at the CineVegas film festival.