The Artist in Winter

(continued from p. 123)

Kurn Hattin School for Girls. Occasionally he packed paints and canvas along with the sauna tools on saunapäivä and set up facing west, painting the view across the river. More often he sat on the sauna porch, cooling down, and simply looked out over the pond.

That day, however, his gaze rested on the hole he’d cut in the ice. He noticed, for the first time with a painter’s eye, the extreme contrasts of light and dark in the watery rectangle surrounded by ice. In the water itself, he saw intense greens, yellows, turquoise—a kaleidoscope of colors. He thought, This might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Back in his studio, Aho worked from memory, reframing the scene as if he stood on the far side of the plunge pool, the broad river valley dropping away beyond the snowcovered pond, winter clouds massing overhead; the avanto , a dark rectangle, anchoring the painting’s bottom edge. The landscape revealed a personal commentary on loss and disappearance. He drew on his father’s ice harvesting stories, his father’s death, the ineffable connections he felt to his father when he cut through the ice. He called the painting Ice Cutter.

When Aho returned to the sauna the next winter, he looked more closely at his avanto. He studied where he had scored the ice, marking the intersections of lines at the corners of the trapezoid. In the studio, he moved in closer to the hole as well. The view across the valley disappeared, along with any hint of horizon, the pond now merely implied. He enlarged the black hole to the size of the actual avanto and tilted it upright. The black shape dominated the canvas.

The avanto in Aho’s new painting was still discernible as a hole in the ice, but what had been part of a scene became an independent shape, separate from landscape. He called it Ice Cut and immediately started another.

Aho realized that he had embarked on a series. He’d been thinking about decades: how turning 40 marked 10 years since his father’s death; how his father’s years at the ice harvest coincided with the Depression. He made a plan to paint an Ice Cut each year for a decade.

He decided to give each painting two dates: one for the year he painted it, and the other, in parentheses, from one of his father’s seasons on the ice, a date that also gave Aho multilayered sources of inspiration. He drew from his father’s fragmented stories and also from what was happening in the world, and in modern art, during that parenthetical year. He imagined his father and remembered himself at the same age. As his son entered the same season of life, Aho thought of him, too.

With each new Ice Cut , Aho felt his art become more personal and layered with meaning, but also—for a working artist—more risky. He watched people respond very differently, often viscerally, to the paintings, even before they knew what they were looking at. A big, black rectangular hole. Some recoiled, as if from the void: death, loss, emptiness. A question hangs over this saunapäivä —whether any of the Ice Cut s in the New York show will actually sell.

Among the critics, there is no question about Aho’s achievement. Christopher Volpe, writing for Art New England , said of the show at the Hood Museum, “[T]he series offers a rich, sustained meditation.” For The Boston Globe ’s Sebastian Smee, it was “a major accomplishment.”

Most years, Aho has made not one but three or four Ice Cut paintings, living with winter throughout the year. At some point, looking at Monet’s snow scenes, he was struck by the thought that the great artist had painted winter as a tourist.

In his most recent works, growing bolder, Aho has experimented with color, refracting through memory the kaleidoscopic hues he saw the first time he looked at the avanto as an artist. He’s painted it in the yellows of an arctic summer, in tropical turquoise and aquamarine, in sizes even larger than life. He is not ready to stop. “I feel like I’m just now scratching the surface,” he says.

He comes to it, again, on this January afternoon. He sits as long as he can in the 200-degree sauna. Walking out into the sharp winter air, he steps out of his sauna shoes and onto the towel at the edge of the avanto. Steam rises from his skin. He lowers himself to the edge, swings his legs into the freezing water.

The questions he had asked himself after his father’s death would remain unanswered, but he was coming to a clearer understanding of what he had inherited.

He had been given a distinctly northern sensibility and a vantage on two cultures half a world apart. His father’s stories had animated a deeply personal and creative exploration. Through the tools of his art, he had met the extremes of winter with extremes of imagination and created a lasting legacy.

Aho will end up selling a dozen pieces as a result of the New York show: one to a museum, the others to private collectors. Ice cut from New Hampshire, once more a luxury, will again bring winter into distant homes.

But it wasn’t ice that Aho was harvesting: It was ice’s absence, the void left when ice is no longer there. The loss is not an abstraction. A century ago, ice removed from Lake Potanipo was routinely two feet thick; in the past few years, locals say, it’s been only half that.

Other questions hang over saunapäivä . As the earth continues to warm, what will it mean to be northern? What will it mean when natural ice is no longer a common, everyday part of the landscape for our grandchildren? What tools—what extremes of imagination—will be needed to color that future inheritance?

Aho pauses almost imperceptibly. The black hole represents what is lost, the past, the gap between what is real and what cannot be known. It represents the path and the leap.

He puts his palms flat against the ice, pushes off, and takes the plunge.