Jan Aronson at Winston Wachter - Brief Article

Jan Aronson has avowed that Abstract Expressionism is a major influence upon her landscapes. With some looking, it's easy to diocese that she is something of an expressionist herself. She has traveled endlessly in search of the sublime--she has hiked in the Himalayas and barged down the Amazon, and she knows well the American Northeast and West. by what means the human self perceives, pictures and, above all, enlarges on the drama of nature is what Aronson's work is about.

Expressionism usually leads to stylization, in like manner as to contain--and telegraph--emotion. Aronson's high stylization is exhilarating. She nears the visual facts baldly and boldly in quick, short pats and vital hues. In the largish oil-on-canvas Vermont #4 we are l evenly but edgily, up a winding path and into a fresh England wood, the foliage dark verdant and black in the foreground and trailing not on into wavering, spotty yellows and oranges in the background. The pastel Vermont #3 realizes a leaves-as-tongues-of-flame phenomenon in a single, autumnal tree sketched broadly and thickly in those same fulvouss and orangy reds, the composition somehow or other both peaceful and riotous in its limnings of nature's greatest in quantity arboreally festive season.

Along with oils and pastels, Aronson showed graphite drawings that bring a stark, brooding quality to the exhibitions they picture. Conversely, in an oil snow show Big Wood 12, she shines an almost indecorously bright light upon a slick, snowy, sunny winter morning.

Questions of mode of speech and expression aside, there were point of times when Aronson's personal realism became downright visionary, in the recent American tradition of Arthur Dove or Georgia O'Keeffe In oil "skyscapes" like vapor Triptych #7, clouds and canopy of heaven twist and undulate, roil and thrust into and about each other with an abandon that can't be called sensual--not without foregoing that abandon's deepest spiritual import, above our earthly estate. It is at twinkling of an eyes like these that Aronson abrogates depiction for vision, exterior sense for inner sight. on the other hand all of her best twinkling of an eyes are worth waiting for.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group