Ben Aronson

Transcription

1 Ben Aronson Background and artist statement I was raised in a family of artists. Both my father David Aronson, and mother Georgianna Nyman Aronson are long established painters. My father s works are included in many of the major museum collections in this country including the MOMA and Whitney Museums in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. My mother has painted official portraits of such notables as Sandra Day O Connor, Harry Blackmun, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. My great grandmother, Annie Benson Mueller was also a painter and produced brilliant realistic watercolor illustrations of idealized babies for the ad campaigns of Hood Milk Co. and assorted magazine covers long ago, which are now highly collectible. And my own two talented sons have decided on a life in the visual arts as well. I must say I am very proud of all of them. Interestingly, we all share the same respect for artistic integrity and aesthetic quality, but individually, in each case, our work is entirely different which I believe to be very healthy. This was underscored by my fathers philosophy that there are certain elements which all great art requires apart from style; universal challenges which must be met in every artists own unique and individual way. Now retired from teaching and still an active artist at 83, he was also an influential teacher who founded the art department at Boston University in 1955 where I later earned my degrees. At a time when non figurative approaches were abandoned from many art programs, BU offered a traditional painting curriculum which was considered serious business and rigorously taught like a language. By the time students finished their four undergraduate years of training they were expected to be able to communicate coherently in visual terms with a comprehensive knowledge of the masters, past and present, along with fluent skills in drawing and painting from observation. At that point students were ready to continue into the graduate program to attempt to say something artistically literate of their own with this visual language, under the guidance of modern masters. It was a tremendous experience. The painter Phillip Guston was affiliated with Graduate Painting Program at Boston University School of Fine Art while I was studying painting there. With his health deteriorating at that time, I was given the opportunity to be his driver between his home in Woodstock, New York and his lectures at Boston University in It was a powerful and formative encounter, establishing for me a connection with the contributions of the abstract expressionists and action painters in New York, specifically through stories of his friends DeKooning and Kline. Staying nights on a cot in his Woodstock, NY studio, alone and surrounded by his disquieting late work, I slept with one eye open. Being a painting student at the time, one of the most illuminating conversations I recall with him involved my question concerning how a young painter, such as myself, was to find his way with painting after the support structure and guidance of art school ended, and I was left to somehow determine my own direction. Smiling, he took a long draw on his ever present cigarette and answered, Well Ben you keep on painting! But you aren t really alone in your studio. You still have your professors invisibly present, whispering in your ear, and as you work they continue to guide you. Eventually, as you fully internalize what is most relevant to you, they leave one by one. But you still aren t alone, you are left with the master painters throughout history whom you admire, and they whisper in your ear. Eventually they too depart, and finally you are on your own. This all sounded very rational to me until he added, now when you reach this point, if you are really lucky, then

2 you leave the studio, but a hand stays behind to paint the picture. This is the best work you will produce. These strange and wise words stayed with me, referring to tapping into the universal subconscious, or what some might call being in the zone. Over the years I have found it to be true for myself, and confirmed in my later readings of conversations with Richard Diebenkorn who said in a different way that part of painting is physical, another part intellectual. The most highly prized aspect is the intuitive, when it is operative. During graduate school at Boston University for two years, I studied painting with James Weeks who introduced to me the works of the Bay Area Figurative painters such as Park, Diebenkorn, Bischoff, Oliveira, Neri, Thiebaud, and others. From the time I encountered these painters, I found their powerful compositions, use of light and space, and the utilization of observed reality as abstract structure tremendously exciting. Actually, the reconciliation of realism and abstraction, the dynamics of light and space, composition as a contest of forces, and the manipulation of the paint itself are among the important elements that have always interested me in the works of the many masters that I admire both ancient and contemporary from the cave walls at Lascaux to Rembrandt and Corot, to Sargent, Hopper, Bacon, Kline, and DeKooning to name a few. In working from familiar surroundings, as I often do, I find that in order to raise a work from the commonplace to the extraordinary from a simple descriptive record to a work of art, the main objective is not merely physical likeness, but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience. Perfect spelling alone does not make great poetry, just as the realistic rendering of numerous visual facts will not alone amount to high art. One can consider masters as different in style as Vermeer and DeKooning and still agree that all great painting is derived through some process of interaction with, or distillation from the visible world. Guided by a developed sensibility, countless conscious and subconscious choices are made through the process of creating a work, with emphasis on certain key things which can profoundly deepen and intensify a particular visual event. I feel that this process of careful selection and reorganization of the developing paintings ingredients is at the center of the creative act. These choices, when successfully accumulated, serve to lead the viewer to experience the image with heightened consciousness. As many masters have proven in the lasting power of their works, painting can be very much involved and about this process of search. Francis Bacon eloquently alluded to this in having stated that The goal of painting is not illustration, but a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation. To capture these elusive dualities, it seems that for me it is necessary to search for and find the decisive and mysterious moment in the development of the work where all the essential elements are in place landing somewhere between realism and abstraction, definition and mystery, reinforced by the formal tensions and energies of the picture. I believe my work is at its best when the contest between these forces is captured at the highest possible pitch. Ben Aronson

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10