Eric Aho: Sundial by LewAllen Galleries

SUNDIAL

LewAllenGalleries

Eric Aho Sundial April 30 - June 5, 2021

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: The Close (detail), 2015, oil on linen, 36 x 30 inches

Meadow, 2016-17, oil on linen, 80 x 80 inches

Eric Aho SUNDIAL

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn The name of this exhibition, Sundial, is surprisingly ripe with metaphorical possibility and particularly so in relation to the art of Eric Aho. It is not only the title of a radiant Aho painting included in this show, but also it conjures images of the sun’s energy conferred upon the earth, the movement and changing character of light across time, and how time, like the forces of nature, reduces the seemingly immutable to the merely ephemeral. This most ancient of timepieces evokes thoughts about the intransigent ontology of time and its ubiquitous involvement in every aspect of human life. The paintings of Eric Aho engage aspects of these issues through the agency of nature and its ineluctable impact on the world. Time moves, rivers rush, waves crash, wind blows, lightning strikes, earth shifts. Aho manifests in his images these various forces of nature, their effects, and ultimately the sublime beauty of these effects. His work is a chronicle of nature’s repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth, the ultimate anthology of nature and time convergence. It is interesting to know, too, that from the era of early civilizations – and now for more than 5,500 years since the invention of “shadow clocks” by Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians – gauging time and its movement has been a preoccupation of people and a critical aspect of life and economic and social organization. The measurement of time affects such crucial decisions as the moment at which important tasks should most optimally be performed. 4

Essay continued

28 October, 2018, oil on linen, 30 x 36 inches

Broken Tree in a Ravine, 2020, oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

It is essential to the concept of “progress” and without it there would be no past, present or future, no concept of history, and memory would be untethered to rational, linear thought. Human consciousness would be a jumble and progress random. The humble sundial enabled early recognition of these issues and made it possible for thinkers to develop philosophies and sciences that are underpinnings for the evolution and development of all cultures. And throughout Eric Aho’s paintings, the sun’s light – direct, reflected in moonlight, dabbled in forests, suggested in shadow – illuminates the imagery in the works. As with a sundial that tracks and displays the movement of the sun, so Aho’s paintings use the sun’s light as it appears – quite differently -- during various moments in the arc of this movement from sunrise to sunset. The subtle or obvious differences in the sun’s contribution to observation are subsequently transferred by Aho into integral elements of composition. And like a sundial, the works are about the movement of time and, over its course, the ramifications of nature’s forces on the land. He is a self-proclaimed flâneur of nature, exploring through woods, in fields, along the banks of streams, inspired by insatiable curiosity. Aho began his career as a plein-air painter whose painting contained more literal references to nature and landscape forms than in his current work which has leaned increasingly toward the more abstract. For Aho, abstraction is perhaps more suited to his desire to convey experiences and memories of being in nature – itself full of ambiguities, or as Keats might phrase it, those “sweeter unheard melodies.” Over time, his work has begun to dissolve the overt, the “heard melodies,” and investigate the subtleties of the land’s poetry and its compositional innuendos and complexities. Abstraction offers Aho the opportunity to find novel ways of reassembling the forms of nature in his art – using innovative shapes, colors, lines, gestures – to suggest the power of nature as it moves through time. Aho’s paintings are not intended to mirror reflections of people, places or things. His interest instead is to make art that arises from an introspective process involved in finding the spiritual – what the Greeks called the pneuma or “breath” – of the world. This artist creates art that is unlimited in the ideas and emotions that it might inspire.

Essay continued

Tarn Trail, 2017, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Beekeeper, 2017, oil on linen, 50 x 60 inches

Brother's Birthday, 2018, oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches

Sundial, 2014, oil on linen, 80 x 80 inches

In this regard, Aho has talked about a kind of spontaneity in his work, what he calls “the casual eye” which he describes as being “not about making something [but] about letting something arrive” in his painting. He does not work from photography saying that it “polluted my own experience … I am trying to build these paintings out of things I’ve seen [even if] I may have only seen them for two seconds or a minute. For me, photography ruins it. It takes away from the fullness of my mind and the aqueous vision ….” Today, Aho is widely regarded as one of the finest abstract painters working whose inspiration includes nature and the land. In the tradition of legendary predecessors such as Wolf Kahn and Forrest Moses (both of whose work LewAllen also represented and both of whom passed away in the last year or so) Aho uses his direct experience of nature as an impetus for making beautiful expressive paintings. Like these artists before him, Aho has an extraordinary ability to disassemble observation and, using memory and imagination, reassemble its elements and essences as expressions of vivid interior experience. But the similarities might be argued to largely end there. Whereas both Kahn and Moses painted scenes that were distinguished in conferring a sense of peace and tranquility, Aho’s work veritably explodes with energy. This is the energy of nature itself, released in time, constantly moving, changing, and affecting the world. There is in Aho’s paintings not only a sense of place in nature but also the scintillation of its gloriously tumultuous aspects – roaring rivers, gusting wind, swaying trees, thundering waterfalls. It is as though Aho paintings come with a soundtrack, and the sounds and smells of the woods and water might seem to waft from them. Most of all, they seem to reach out and grab the viewer with an embrace that is enlivening and full of the vivacity of the land. In the artist’s words, he wants in his work to “place the viewer right in the path of the rapids.”

Copper Falls, 2020, oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

Essay continued

Open Stream in Winter, 2021, oil on linen, 24 x 22 inches

Ice Out 1, 2020, oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches

Owl, 2018, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Pinewood Nocturne No. 2, 2018, oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches

Aho talks about “crashing into the landscape” as he studies and lives its reality. For Aho, the elemental forces of nature seem to create for him places conducive to inward contemplation and expression. His compositions are concerned with attaining characteristics of the subject locations themselves: mystery, ambiguity, unpredictability and enormous power. His painterly gestures emit a kind of nuanced poetry: an eloquent sharing of his engagement with the environments into which he ventures. Just as one cannot truly experience nature without being in it, Aho’s strength as a mid-career artist would seem to grow from making that experience a part of him and then, with what he has referred to as “honesty and conviction,” letting that experience flow onto his canvas. Noting the resulting vigor of Aho’s work, the editors of The New Criterion once said about them: “[Aho’s] strong contemporary painting … return[s] a sense of exuberant, abstract Romanticism to scenes of hinterland wilderness.” Certainly that sense of exuberance is very much evident in the works included in this exhibition. With his spirited brushstrokes and animated use of color and light, Aho produces engaging works that exude a dynamism that becomes not only a signature quality of his painting but also an apt reflection of the astonishing power of nature itself. Many of his works verge on the monumental. They exhibit a feeling of timelessness commensurate with that compressed into boulders, escarpments and other forms of the natural world. These qualities can elicit in his audience myriad variety of emotional responses. Aho is a master of reducing the vastness of nature’s endless diversity into ravishing imagery that warms the heart and ignites the imagination. After often literally plunging into and through nature, Aho follows the immediacy of that immersion by a reflective process and thoughtful distance that is necessarily entailed when painting in his studio. There he relies on the sensations he retains in memory from his experience of being present in a place. From this cauldron of creative impulses, he combines the brute force of nature that he experiences with a scrupulous delicacy of technique that is the essential nature of an Aho painting at this point in his career. He says of some of his work that this extraordinary combination of impulses inspires his taking the violence of nature (a crashing rapid, ice broken on a lake, branches strewn and askew, etc.) and painting it lovingly and carefully, “like you would a cloud or a flower.”

Essay continued

Edge of Pinewoods, 2018, oil on linen, 30 x 36 inches

Ilves, 2014, oil on linen, 60 x 48 inches

Gorge, 2020, oil on linen, 78 x 70 inches

Cricket, 2018, oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches

Aho crafts his paintings so as to meld what he calls the “retinal memory “of his experience with his imagination. From these reflections he evolves the poetic images of place that he places on canvas. These paintings become paeans to the sheer joy of experiencing raw authenticity in nature. It is here, in the ecstatic works of Eric Aho, that there is found what Whitman termed “the intersection of the soul and time.” The convergence between artist and subject – both visceral and reflective – appears the animating spirit of his current work. There is a palpable sense in which Aho brings his experience of nature and of the land into himself and, through himself, onto the canvas. In that act of integration and transcendence – and its imprint in his art – there is a kind of truth. And one is reminded of the kind William Faulkner spoke about in Go Down, Moses: “Truth is One. It doesn’t change. It covers all things which touch the heart.” It is this enduring kind of truth that exists in the woods of Aho’s Vermont, as fully as in the wilderness of Faulkner’s Mississippi. It is the kind of truth that is in Aho’s paintings and the kind that unfailingly touches the heart – both of himself and of his observer. It is an unchanging truth that comes from the intimacy of truly experiencing whatever he encounters – what he calls “a kind of unity” – and which, in its “unheard melodies” and the defiance of time’s movement, ultimately touches the heart of us all. Kenneth R. Marvel

Rapids II, 2020, oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

Essay continued

Pink Granite, 2020, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Swedish Axe, 2018, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Downstream, 2020, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Small Spider Island, 2018, oil on linen, 11 x 14 inches

Hunter, 2018, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Second Rapids, 2019, oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

Little Sunday Painting VII, 2019, oil on linen, 10 x 8 inches

Rapids I, 2020, oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

State Park, 2017, oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches

Spanish Painter, 2018, oil on linen, 48 x 60 inches

Mill Falls, 2020, oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

Waterfall (Ausable River), 2019, oil on linen, 50 x 60 inches

Eric Aho

(b. 1966 in Melrose, MA )

EDUCATION 1992 Postgraduate certificate, Institute of Art and Design, Lahti, Finland 1989 Graduate study, Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, Cuba; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA 1988 BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA 1987 Diploma, Advance Studies in Printmaking, Central School of Art and Design, London, United Kingdom

1996 1994 1991 1989

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Sundial, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2020 DC Moore Gallery, NY (also 2018, 2017, 2015, 2013, 2011, and 2009) 2018 A Thousand Acres, Highland Center for the Arts, Greensboro, VT 2018 Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY 2017 Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX 2016 Toward a Bright Opening, Catamount Arts, St. Johnsbury, VT An Unfinished Point in a Vast Surrounding, New Britain Museum of American Art, CT Ice Cuts, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH 2013 In the Landscape, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC 2012 Transcending Nature, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH 2010 Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (also 2007 and 2005) Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC (also 2006) 2009 Ice Box, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, VT 2008 Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA (also 2006, 2004, and 2002) Brick Walk Fine Art, West Hartford, CT (also 2006) 2007 Reeves Contemporary, New York, NY (also 2005 and 2003) 2006 Copper Field Suite: New Monotypes, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT 2005 Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX (also 2004) 2004 Spheris Gallery, Bellows Falls, VT (also 2001, 1999, and 1998) 2003 Gallery BE’19, Helsinki, Finland Paesaggio Gallery, West Hartford, CT The Overhead Lake: New Paintings, Hargate Art Center, St. Paul’s School, Concord, NH; traveled to Tremaine Gallery, Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, CT 2002 Munson Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (also 2000) Watershed: Paintings of the Connecticut River Valley, Saint- Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, NH 2001 Susan Conway Gallery, Washington, DC (also 1999) 2000 Barton-Ryan Gallery, Boston, MA 1999 Galleria Pintura, Helsinki, Finland 1998 The Qualities of Heaven and Earth, Oulu City Art Museum, Finland; traveled to T.W. Wood Gallery & Arts Center, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT; Embassy of Finland, Washington, DC

SELECTED COLLECTIONS Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland Boston Public Library, MA Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH Denver Art Museum, CO Hood Museum, Hanover, NH Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Ministry of Culture, Havana, Cuba Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA National Academy Museum, New York, NY National College of Art, Oslo, Norway Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY New Britain Museum of American Art, CT The New York Public Library, New York, NY Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME Oulu Museum of Art, Finland The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA Setesdal Museum, Rysstad, Norway Springfield Art Museum, MO Theatre Academy Helsinki, Finland United States Embassy, Helsinki, Finland University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland University of Cape Town, South Africa Vermont State Art Collection, Montpelier, VT

Nocturnes, Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT Oulu City Art Museum, Finland 1995 Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT Gallery Pelin, Helsinki, Finland Paintings from the Hemlock Ravine, Tyler Gallery, Marlboro College, VT Fototeca de Cuba, Ministry of Culture, Havana, Cuba

SELECTED AWARDS 2009 Elected National Academician, National Academy Museum and School, New York, NY 2003 The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY 2000 The John Koch Award for Painting, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY 1998 Julius Hallgarten Prize, National Academy of Design, New York, NY 1997 Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Montpelier, VT 1994 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc., New York, NY 1993 The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY

Image credit to Eric Aho and DC Moore Gallery

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com © 2021 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC In Cooperation with DC Moore Gallery Photography by Rachel Portessi