Paintings Through the Lens of Photography
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John M. Martin, Author
At the end of a detour down some unmarked stretch of road disfigured with No Trespassing Signs and weathered fence posts bound with barbed wire, a view of the valley stretched out before us that was exactly what my good friend the artist Jeff Aeling had been on the hunt for. We climbed out of our vehicle and began to take pictures, Jeff with his Nikon and I with my cell phone. Several minutes later, Jeff disappeared into a ravine, returning some moments later with the trademark cigarette clamped in his fingers, ready to head off in search of the next image.
Why this particular place, you might ask? To the extent that I understand it, composition is an art not just of arrangement, but also of content. Does the view to be rendered contain the right elements, in the right order, and in accordance with the artist’s unique sense of proportion? As many times as Jeff has explained it to me, I still would not say I fully understand it, but of the following elements I feel fairly certain.
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First and foremost, clouds are a necessity. With two thirds to three quarters of his paintings allocated to the space above the horizon, something is needed to give the space volume and a sense of drama, an aesthetic much in keeping with a tradition that American landscape painters helped to pioneer. Prior to this, nature was looked on as something to fear, a force with the power to bring devastation, to render man helpless, to topple entire civilizations. With the Romantics, the aesthetic shifted, endowing nature with divine properties. Awe replaced fear.
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The shift can be seen in the painters belonging to what came to be known as the Rocky Mountain School of landscape painters, a school that included Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Hill. For example, if you look at the series of canvases Thomas Moran made of the Grand Canyon, you can see a lot of the elements you tend to find in Jeff’s work: the high sense of drama embodied in nature, the tactile quality of the forms that populate the landscape, an almost felt sense of the earth’s curvature, as well as its high points and low points; paintings intended to capture not just the look but the feel of the place.
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By embracing these principles, Jeff seeks to transform what might have been little more than a snapshot into a total aesthetic experience that represents not just the visual elements of the particular landscape but its emotional impacts as well, providing the viewer a door into artistic perception.
A critical aspect of Jeff’s process is the photographs he shoots in advance of his next body of work. Photographs are not just a convenience, a way to bookmark a particular image or landscape, but crucial to the experience he’s attempting to recreate. “To compose a painting outdoors would be an anachronism because it no longer corresponds to the way that we actually see things. Experience itself largely conforms to the pictures we take of it, affecting perception and memory; we in fact process our surroundings through the lens of photography.”
In making his paintings, Jeff strives to invoke the photograph’s ephemeral nature, focusing on the particulars of a specific moment in time, not an amalgam of experience as was the case with his predecessors. “In a Moran landscape, the patterns of light and shadow, the way that the clouds arrange themselves in the sky, these are all composites, collected over a period of time. I offer the viewer a different experience: the chance to contemplate an image that can never be repeated.”
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I have been fortunate enough to accompany Jeff on a number of these expeditions and to witness his process firsthand, and what I have learned from watching him work is that the sights that he chooses to photograph also must contain certain elements. As already mentioned, clouds are a necessity, for without them the sky’s role in the composition would be negligible. Clouds give the sky volume and character, a critical element in the overall composition.
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Jeff also gravitates toward landscapes that feature wide, level areas lorded over by mountainous backdrops, where the shadows cast by the clouds can move unhindered through the landscape. Manmade elements such as fences and pole lines, if present, are omitted from the final image because they add perspective, and perspective gifts the viewer with a sense of mastery over what he is seeing, rather than feeling dwarfed by its majesty. Manmade objects are like instructions telling the viewer how to look at the painting, whereas without them, the viewer becomes the camera; there’s nothing to mediate the experience. You end up having the exact same experience as the artist’s.
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We generally head out in the mornings, choosing the roads to be explored at random, without a clear plan. Once we come to a place with the elements already described, we pull off the road and begin to take pictures, often returning again after dinner to observe the sunset, a strategy that almost always pays off because dusk is the time when the clouds take on the most color. I would guess that Jeff takes upwards of 50+ photos during these times, from which perhaps one or two images will eventually be rendered in paint.
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It’s easy to forget as we’re driving around discussing some film that we’ve seen or the present state of the country that Jeff is actually working, his gaze always readied for a promising landscape or a dramatic formation of clouds. By the same token, if we fail to happen upon the right combination of elements, he has nothing to paint, making the stakes quite a bit higher than they would be for some tourist out taking snapshots.
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Such views can’t be invented or crafted from memory. They require the cooperation of forces and elements beyond our control. But Mother Nature is not always cooperative, or even kind, and this too can be inferred from Jeff’s epic creations.
A Volume of Time, Motion, and Scale
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Hesse Caplinger, Author
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Jeff Aeling is an American. He is an American painter. He is an American painter of American landscapes. But his paintings are not about predestination or the fertility of American soil or the wonder of its natural expressions or beautiful exceptionalism. Church and Bierstadt do this. They paint the material glories of the American plate. They enumerate its possessions and exalt them: they are wonderful, rare, and glorious. This, one might say, is the heart, the essence of the tradition of American landscape painting. Because Jeff Aeling is an American, an American painter, an American painter painting American landscapes, his work is easily and carelessly collected beneath these sweeping assumptions. However, while it may be that his work is about individualism—in the sense of experience, rather than self-determination—and while his work is about the relationship of the individual to what he surveys—in the sense of contemplation rather than conquest—his work may be said, in that literary sense, to be American—because it is about man versus nature, rather than the European, man versus man. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally distinct from the tradition of American meanings. One may say that his work is rather more touched by the European landscape tradition—appreciation, fear, suspicious regard—and brought to bear upon the panoramic, deceptive, transitory, gently rolling geography of American experience: primarily, that of the untrafficked American heartland.
Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900), an American, and Albert Bierstadt (1830 – 1902), a German-American, are celebrated for their Romanticism, for their idealized paintings of idealized settings, of idealized moments. They paint grandeur and majesty, and their work seems accompanied by string and horn sections trumpeting the deification of the land—indeed, we understand their depictions to be the beauteous gifts in transmission to the faithful. These works ring with ideology, and with destiny. The Hudson River School, broadly, is enmeshed with this glorification of the natural and consequent elevation of he who glorifies it: the faithful enfolded in the bosom of the host. Collectively, the frescos and ornaments of a new, American basilica—one whose nave and transept are roofless and unbounded.
Aeling’s concentrations could not be further from such Hudson River pieties, however. In temperament, sentiment, and form, Aeling perhaps more closely resembles the urge toward realism of the French Barbizon school. But here again are crucial evolutionary distinctions: still, the Barbizon landscape functions in the pastoral, the bucolic. It remains a setting for man. Relative to that former, it is made the more ‘real,’ perhaps, by featuring laborers and preferring seeded plains and settings of manual toil. But however more stylistically expressive, and otherwise suffused with the common and the ‘real,’ these too, remain works about the province of human virtue, about honesty in the necessity of action, and—as in the work of Jean-François Millet—always tempering the immediacy of foreground livestock and industry, with the vastness of background, and the opportunity it portends. However more pluralistic, this too, is painting resonant with ideology: a Protestant reformative expression, as to a Catholicized Hudson glory.
Almost without exception, Aeling’s work is not ideological. It is conceptual. Never more obviously so than when he slyly subverts the genre: painting lava fountains, volcanic eruptions, waterspouts, fire devils, hurricanes, ordinance detonations, and even galactic formations. Such images playfully, but seriously, challenge established dogmas about position and proximity; what falls within the envelope of articulable natural phenomena; asserts intimate correspondence between the awesome, the terrible, and the beautiful; and skewers the pastoral with a wide-eyed appreciation of man’s darker totality. Even his painstakingly drafted still lives—Turnips and Radicchio, for example—might also be understood as genre subversive, or subversion-adjacent. The more so, because these too echo Aeling’s prevailing geometric tensions of foreground, background, positive and negative space, and the suspended question of subject.
Importantly, Aeling is not a plein-air painter. As a matter of the formal landscape tradition, it is yet another point by which he veers from the various orthodoxies of predecessors. Consequently, his works are not chronological composites. They are not ‘out of time,’ in that they contain it in vastness, or smear it into generalities. Nor are they chronologically flat, as in the case of Ansel Adams, or photography more generally. Instead, they are specific. They contain discrete intervals of time—sometimes an instant, sometimes a moment—most often, they possess a pause the length of a breath. As in the impressionistic Sunset Near Junction City, Kansas, where a high, secondary layer of cloud shimmers and shifts, and it is this light in action which animates the sky and landscape below. Or, Thunderstorm South of Wamego, Kansas, in which we see, not merely the depiction of a rain curtain on the distant plain, but witness its weight against the landscape, and the turbulent displaced air, and we observe its motion—thrown down in violence, and its plodding, scouring march across the plain . . . to us. However brief, Aeling’s time has volume; his intervals are lived, as opposed to idealized or generalized, interstices of time. Not characterized, but rather, contained, and made available to us.
As a matter of art-historical peerage, there are very many we will not see reflected in Aeling’s work. Of those we might: John Frederick Kensett (1816 – 1872)—an outlier of the Hudson River School—for his luminist sensibility and rare intuition for and depiction of water; George Inness (1825 – 1894)—an outlier of the Barbizon school—in terms of tonal and compositional approach, realist intention, and evocative purpose; and Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840)—just generally, an outlier—for his overtly anti-classical depictions, his emotional complexity, and his insistence upon the landscape as a subjective instrument for the expression of an otherwise objective medium. There are various affinities shared by these artists with Aeling, but here again, even among those perhaps most friendly to his intellectual, depictive, and expressive intentions, he strikes out on still more individual and nuanced paths. In crucial ways, Aeling’s work must be understood as relentlessly interrogative and exploratory, even as against the harmony of close historical sympathizers.
To see why this is, and how, it is useful to consider something of the anatomy of the landscape. On that anatomy, Aeling says this:
The vista is an open space with an unobstructed view to the horizon; the glade, a more intimate space containing trees and rocks, things that relate to or share human scale; and the grotto, an enclosed natural space that offers shelter. Each of these spaces have psychological states associated with them. The vista calls the sense of self into question, you realize your smallness, your relative insignificance, and in some cases the reality of your existence. The glade is where you experience commonality, the ways in which you’re similar to other parts of the natural world, how you share its characteristics. The grotto is a space where revelation is experienced, it represents inner space, the space where the ‘self’ resides, and where you’re the most receptive to knowledge coming from both inside and outside the self.
Beside such discernment, one of the most fascinating realizations, and indeed a mark to the extent of his subversion—is that Aeling himself does not strictly adhere to these characterizations; in fact, he challenges, transposes, and transliterates these archetypes in sophisticated and transformative ways.
Key to how Aeling achieves this is also where he most strikingly diverges from the established schools of the genre, strictly eschews the pastoral, and veers toward the conceptual and strains of abstraction. There are no people. Almost without exception, the Aeling landscape removes the whole of man, and the material evidence of mankind. And while perhaps this will sound like a simple enough conceit, its affect on the resonant potential of meanings in his work is profound. Gone are the visual homilies of smoking chimneys, and the place holders for the industriousness of man: barns and thatch and husbandry. So too then are gone, any possible conversations about virtue: not of labor, or earnestness, of conviction or conquest; inquiries into technology or anachronism. These are impossible. And so also does their omission raise the volume of tension in the work: What does he mean to say with such prefigurative language?
Aeling’s glades, too, complicate their archetype—where we confront imposing tonal barriers, as in the Friedrich-like Pine Forest Twilight; or, in the case of the seasonally bare trees and dissuasive underbrush of Early Spring. The viewer is placed low in the frame, and left less in pure observation, than with the proposition of confounding terrain. But without question, it is with the Aeling vista that the archetype is most vigorously challenged. In Twilight, Wet Mountain Valley, Colorado, we see a verdant grass and scrub oak valley which sweeps into the distance, rolling onto foothills and staggered mountain steppe, and eventually, against the silhouette of a distant mountain range. Here we see a prime illustration of the volume of time and space Aeling captures: the vegetation is damp, the air is humid but cooling quickly with the sunset. The sky is striations of violet which echo and replay contours of the foreground and midground and the serrated edge of mountain cleft. This lends the scene a sense of convergence and continuity: the midground, background, and sky are held in comparative suspense, and we are made to understand that the question of near imperceptible motion—of constrained action and change—is at the root of the piece. The suspended interval presents a source of action and contrasting markers of time: the geologic, the organic, and the atmospheric—the ephemeral, the gradual, immutable.
East of Castle Rock, Colorado, we stand in a field of immature cereal grass where the ground stretches away toward a razor-flat and inconclusive horizon. The heat of the sun falls away to our right, and we observe a storm head disorganizing and dissolving into evening. The energy of this heaven is dissipatory, while that of the earth is obdurate, inscrutable. Rather than altars we supplicate before, as in that Hudson River scheme, we find that Aeling’s vistas are simultaneously impersonal and intimate. Indeed, the Aeling vista calls the scale of ‘self’ to question—but this is least and last of its functions. The Aeling vista is an open-air grotto. Here we find—rather than chastening and humbling exterior vastnesses—deep, immeasurable interiors. These are spaces without people or sheltering respite, because we are alone here, and unable to hide from the tremors of our own revelation.
These objects, these meditative stillnesses, substrates for the dialog of being—breathing pauses—are numinous, but significantly, they are not sublime. They are far too real, and the forces in observation, far too unsympathetic. These works are not religious. Even the terms ‘pre-religious,’ or ‘spiritual,’ fail properly to embrace them. They are deeply philosophical. Elemental. They ask questions of creation, and as such, they speak to conditions and internalizations which an exclusively clinical secularism struggles to articulate. What is a rightful boundary of a prefigurative ‘I’?—of ‘Thou’? How to depict the question? What do we look like—we two?—how do we embrace?—creation containing the viewer, and the viewer observing himself observing his container?
Aeling’s subjects are—if not never, almost never—destinations of themselves. As would otherwise be the case among those early American heroes of the form—for Church; for Bierstadt. They are not the places one seeks to go, nor generally, the places one seeks to see. They are the places along the way, and they are the conditions of those places along the way, as we find them. That they are ‘Romantic’ insofar as they are evocative, is, generally the extent of their ‘Romantic’ ambitions. Instead, they are something more like the pluralized Stations of our own Cross. They do not speak to destination. They do not pretend to know it. They do not pretend to understand it. They do not even suggest that it will be arrived at or achieved. They are pauses along the way: they stop to see. And these are the images witnessed in that pause: a pause which suggests the journey—the outward-facing depiction implying by a counterbalance of omission, that inward-facing reflection—in many ways the principal subject. The unseen object. What is invisible. The aperture of the viewer—the Platonic pinhole camera obscura—is the location of the human context—the human subject. And what we find reflected in him is suspension; transition; process, but perhaps not progress; a kind of quivering, awestruck uncertainty. If what we see is also beautiful, it is that act of reflection that has made it so—the work appears to say: the scenes themselves are utterly ambivalent to the presence of the viewer, or the act of viewership—as nature itself. And the observation of this ambivalence, this austerity, fosters a revelation in melancholy—an orange and longing pathos: it’s not that we are far from our destination—it’s that we are far from all destinations: it’s not that we are alone—it’s that we are irretrievably alone, always. And that these might be true, and that there might be beauty nevertheless—even if made by our eyes alone—is a miracle.
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