Link to Post:
http://artnewengland.com/blogs/not-tyrannized-by-the-seen/
Arlene Distler blogs about encountering the paintings of Eric Aho and a subsequent visit to Aho's studio.
Distler writes that in Aho's work, "nature is clearly a constant touchstone. Aho talks about still doing plein-air painting, but notes, chuckling, that these excursions do not look like the usual outdoor painter’s. No neat painting box (or messy one for that matter) for him. He goes out in his truck, and basically carries his studio with him. There are buckets of brushes, cans and bowls of paint, some left over from previous paintings. To me, the large abstract oils are an unfettering of what has always been evident in Aho’s work: a love of the medium and an exploration of what a robust and lyrical approach to the laying on of paint can do. How a painting can evoke something seen or remembered and at the same time have a life of its own internal space, form, and color. In the case of Aho, that life is akin to music or dance. Not to overstate, but one senses arabesques in the brushwork and whole symphonies of color."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.yankeemagazine.com/art-reviews/eric-aho-breaks-down-the-new-england-landscape/
Ed Beem blogs about the exhibition Transcending Nature: Paintings by Eric Aho at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester NH, on view through September 9, 2012.
Beem writes "What intrigued me then and intrigues me now is the virtuosity with which Aho handles paint while modulating along a spectrum of descriptive fidelity from painterly realism to pure abstraction. He was a student of George Nick at MassArt and he retains an allegiance to the visible world, yet Aho is also able to free himself from the bonds of description to explore the way paint on canvas becomes its own landscape, every bit as real, perhaps even more so, as a picture of a landscape."
