When artist Eric Aho of Saxton Rivers, Vermont, walked through Putney, Vermont, two summers ago, the loud nature next to him struck a sense of déjà vu.
He recognized the high grass, the plants peeking between the blades, the noise. As Aho stepped into the familiar view, the meadow’s buzz shook the air to a screech “as if I was agitating it,” Aho explained in Deerfield Academy’s von Auersperg Gallery, his paintings spread across the white walls. “Then, after a while, it just got quiet, as if it had accepted that I was there.”
He and the meadow had met before. In July of 1989, Aho moved to Vermont. Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, and raised in Hudson, New Hampshire, Aho traveled to London to study printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design. He earned his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and his graduate degree at the Lahti Art Institute in Finland.
Aho focused on prints and drawings up until 1989, at which point he found himself back in New England to teach painting. He realized he needed to learn to paint after only having dipped his brush in the medium a few times before. “Well I have to start somewhere,” Aho remembered thinking, “how hard can it be?” So he wandered through Putney, eager for inspiration.
He paused at a rowdy meadow, started painting, “And then I never stopped,” Aho explained. In the 35 years between Aho’s first encounter with the meadow and his reunion, Aho’s paintings have stretched the walls of exhibits across the country and beyond, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Oulu City Art Museum in Finland.
When he returned to the meadow, the wilderness ahead of him had become personal. “Aho” translates to “meadow” in Finnish.
“I knew that at the time, except I didn’t make the connection that what I was painting was something of myself. And now I do, and that kind of awareness allowed me to go deeper into it,” he said.
His exhibit, “The Meadow,” features five large-scale oil paintings beckoning viewers to step inside the meadow themselves. Frozen plants and icy blue brushstrokes capture the meadow during winter in “Sugar Snow.” Across the gallery, yellows, greens and browns pop across “Wild Meadow,” a painting of the meadow in summer’s full bloom. A fog of peach, lilac and icy blue fill “Bashō” on the next wall, and crackles of lavender, turquoise and buzzy yellow in “Fireflies in Mist and Moonlight” across from it turn the viewer into a nocturnal creature watching the meadow at night. “Queen Anne’s Lace” leaks onto an outer wall outside the main room, a glimpse of the meadow in summer, overgrown with the plant’s feathers.
“The show spills over,” Aho said, adding that that this spillage embodies the personality of the meadow, an “organism” itself.
“I think of it as a kind of system … it’s sprawling. Meadows spill over their edges, and they’re infiltrated by invasive species; they have all kinds of different levels of life and systems within systems,” Aho said, facing the 20-foot-long “Wild Meadow.” “And painting is that itself; it’s a system. Painting in the hands of any artist develops its own language and it’s own set of rules, and you develop your responses to it.”
Aho said he approaches a painting with an idea, like a painting of the meadow in winter, but then, “Oh, but that blue, I hadn’t planned on that blue, but I’m going to keep it.” To make art, he said he must surrender his brush to the wild experience.
“You give yourself over gradually to the painting,” Aho said. “And there is a point in each of these paintings where the ambition, the will, the drive, all these worldly external things that we all care about, the desire to do something great or be successful, you have to get rid of that.”
“I think you can tell when someone’s trying to prove something,” Aho added. He admitted that he first painted to prove something. Within his works lurked the question, “Will someone pay attention here?” Now, Aho said he hopes that has changed. Instead of painting a perfect puzzle of elements like composition, balance, harmony and other terms he learned in art school, Aho said he paints textures and temperatures.
While nature called him away from the figures his works centered in art school, Aho said he sees surfaces like human textures, “shaggy, shiny, dull.” This perspective grew from the question, “How do I make a painting that doesn’t have a figure in the middle of it? Because that starts to define it too much.”
Painting the meadow, Aho said he started to understand the viewer, a certain plant in the painting and even himself as the figure. “The impulse here is figurative, it starts with the figure,” Aho said of his paintings. “Nature matters, but really it’s our relationship to it that concerns us, because we’re either helping it or we’re not; nothing’s neutral.”
He outlined the relationship with popping bubbles of neon, topaz and frostbitten purple in “Fireflies in Mist and Moonlight.” According to Aho, fireflies pull human minds like moths to a flame. “It’s a compulsion,” he said, adding that the lightning bug glows with symbolism in cultures across the globe.
“The firefly itself is an element of magic … it’s truly of a present moment,” Aho said.
For the artist, the fun of painting fireflies is freeing. “There’s no form here to kind of be beholden to,” he explained. Instead of painting the balance between “something sober and something ecstatic” that he tries to capture in his other paintings, Aho’s fireflies are purely ecstatic. “There’s not a lot of sobriety there; it’s not a hallucination, except it’s a kind of reverie,” he said.
Visitors can walk into Aho’s meadow until Oct. 31 in the von Auersperg Gallery at Deerfield Academy. The opening reception will take place on Sept. 7 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.