James Aponovich: A Retrospective

through June 30

Currier Museum, 210 Myrtle Way, Manchester

603-669-6144

James Aponovich: The Process of Creativity

through May 5

New Hampshire Institute of Art

148 Concord St., Manchester

603-623-0313

on tour

James Aponovich is tall, silver-haired and smiling. It's the first sunny day of spring, and his Friday night opening, "James Aponovich: A Retrospective," earned record attendance for the Currier Museum. Now, tired and happy, a bit rested from a weekend getaway with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Johansson, he's back at it. Today we're invited behind the scenes, to tour with Aponovich and show curator Kurt Sundstrom as they orient the docents to a quarter century of his work: drawings, figures, landscapes and still lifes.

After rounds of smiles and handshakes, Aponovich tells the assembled group, "When I first started out I was afraid of color." Freshly painted gallery walls of Naples yellow, terra cotta and Van Dyke brown serve as background, so this seems an absurd statement when you're enveloped in the gallery space. The neutral colors hold true without shifting to accommodate what's upon them, and his works-lusciously framed, fifty in all, flowered, figurative, architectural, pastoral, painted in rich oils on Belgian linen-pop off the walls and look gorgeous.

He and Sundstrom have art history backgrounds and are complimentary of one another's skills. "Kurt's done a wonderful job of the curation," James says. "Yes, I love this guy. We speak the same language," says Sundstrom in an easy back and forth. They've worked hard to gather the pieces from around New England. Aponovich's work is collected nationally and world-wide, and for him it's a particular pleasure to be honored at home with simultaneous exhibits in Manchester: the retrospective at the Currier and an exhibit at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where he's taught for more than 20 years.

earlier

"This was a real joy... to work on with James. We've bounced over more New England back roads this winter gathering paintings for the show than I care to remember, but it was fun. At best, this is a tenth of James' work," Sundstrom says. The retrospective draws largely on public and private collections in New England. "Fifty works was plenty. Although there are many more in the area, James' paintings need room to breathe. If you try to put them too close together, they try to push each other apart. They have 'wall power.' Really, in a home, one can define a whole room."

James Aponovich is a New Hampshire native, born in Nashua in 1948. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1971, where he came to painting from studying Renaissance art history. "I was a junior art history major who began to paint. I figured now that I knew how some of it worked, I might give it a try. Pretty soon I was a dual major," he says.

One of Aponovich's early teachers at UNH was Mel Zabarsky, an artist and an art historian. Zabarsky thinks it's great they're honoring James with a retrospective. "James has been a hard working painter. He's incredibly disciplined, even in a time when the word 'discipline' is looked upon negatively. The body of his work over the years has been fairly consistent. I remember, even from his early work in class, seeing his ideas about what he wanted to do emerge. And he's stayed dedicated to those ideas."

In art and art history circles there's pressure to categorize. The realists and surrealists mix it up over whether Aponovich belongs to their clique. When asked, Aponovich quips with a grin, "Lone wolf, no club, no tribe." Says Zabarsky, "I wouldn't bother to identify him with any particular school of painters, but I'd say he likes a sort of magic realism that fools the eye. The objects he uses have their own lives and completeness. He's really concerned with the surfaces of things. If the object he's working with is porcelain, it looks like porcelain. Or if it's glass, it looks just like glass." Zabarsky posits that this fidelity to representation "speaks to James' discipline and skill. He has a strong relationship to his objects and their personal meanings. He's true to his particular aesthetic and point of view." An orange, a flower petal or a piece of tissue paper is treated with incredible delicacy, utterly singular. "I haven't seen a lot of his figurative work, but I was very moved by a painting of his daughter he did while she was very sick with cancer," Zabarsky says.

figures

In the second room of the gallery there is a figurative and semi-autobiographical wall where this "Portrait of Ana, 1984" resides as the central focus. Bald from intensive chemotherapy (which saved her life), she's naked and vulnerable, aglow or perhaps illuminated against a black background. This striking and eerie painting is on loan from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Ana's portrait is flanked, left and right, with dad and mom. Aponovich's "Self Portrait" in brown leather jacket and gloves, one glove off, shows a hint of vulnerability under a veneer of stoicism. Aponovich explains it's a nod to a 16th century Holbein painting of a French ambassador (the ambassador was sheathing or perhaps pulling his dagger) but admits "I'm definitely armored." Farther to Ana's right is mom, "Portrait of Elizabeth Johansson," a graphite drawing of the artist's wife that was meant as a study for a portrait that's yet to be painted. Also in the center is another portrait, Ana beside herself, a year later. In black velvet jumper, patent leather shoes and the littlest ribbon in a wisp of returning hair, there's a moment for the audience's curious admiration as she lifts her voice in "Ana Singing, 1985."

Aside from personal work, he's not painting many figures today. Aponovich has had a rare commission now and then from a university president or politico, but he jokes about commissioned portraits as "a nice painting with something wrong with the mouth." That joke at the dedication of a legislator's portrait earned him a 2003 N.H. State House commission after much cajoling by former Gov. Stephen Merrill and his brother.

music and teaching

Aponovich's relationship to color is fearless now. He sometimes describes what he does using specific vocabularies of color, music and kinetics. In describing color mixing, he speaks of notes, chords and tones. His hands sweep in front of canvases to demonstrate the movement of rising color. He shows how columns of physical energy grow from strong foundations to reach a crescendo. When he touches a landscape to show energy, the docents involuntarily gasp, and he jokes, "I can touch it. It's mine."

Aponovich has been teaching on and off at the New Hampshire Institute of Art for two decades (where I teach English and Humanities, for full disclosure). This year is the first of his three-year stint as Artist in Residence, which includes open studio time, mentoring senior painting majors, and, currently, an exhibit of his work called "The Process of Creativity." The Currier Museum show references sketches, drawings and studies that will be at the Institute's show in April and May.

Part of Aponovich's residency means working with folks like Sam Trioli, a 20-year-old sophomore who hails from New Boston. As a young painting student, Aponovich's musically metaphoric way of talking about the visual was tricky for Trioli to grasp at first. "It's hard to communicate feeling with color, and when James talks about chords and composing, sometimes I felt something that wouldn't translate. I was left in this space between reality and the painting." But out of this frustration came a new way of thinking about composing, about being a composer.

"So for instance," Trioli says, "crispness, say, of a mountain against the sky in the distance might be real and right, but makes the painting look flat. I realized I could soften that, blur it, compose it differently." Sam is learning to choose what's true, learning translation so that the emotional landscape is also served by the images he's representing. The blurring makes it wrong actually and right emotionally. Aponovich says that's one of the most difficult things about teaching, to communicate in such a way that lets the Sam Triolis of the world learn how to be Sam Triolis and not Aponoviches.

"Judith's Roses"

Aponovich's first "big" sale (circa 1978) was concurrent with getting kicked out of his first gallery. He had a show on Newberry Street in Boston. After seeing the show, a fellow from the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln came north to his studio in Manchester and noticed a smallish, luminous painting of white roses in a black Oriental vase with stylized cherry blossoms. He made an inquiry, and James sold the painting for $750. However, etiquette dictates that one doesn't sell outside a show. When news of the museum's acquisition got back to the gallery owner, he asked James what he'd received for the work and grimaced when James answered. "I could have sold that painting for 3,000 dollars. You're done here!" he shot back. But "Judith's Roses" attracted attention at the DeCordova, and other shows came along.

Aponovich's works have been shown in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Santa Fe and, recently, in Belgium. His new work (2001-2005) is represented by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery of San Francisco, with prices ranging from $50, 000 to $100,000. "We're mounting a late summer show of 15 still lifes in August that will pick up where the Currier leaves off. We'll also exhibit his work at the International Art Fair in Chicago in late April. Although people may not know James specifically, we're sure they'll respond to the painting," says Tracy Freedman, his San Francisco gallery co-owner.

local landscapes

Aponovich's life has been much lived on the banks of the Merrimack River: born in Nashua, teaching and painting in Manchester, kicking around Concord. Three of the works at the Currier are from his late 1980s "Merrimack" series. "Gateway to Concord" is gritty, capturing our capital's industrial-agrarian mix along the river before it became the Grappone auto mile. For folks who wanted a romanticized gold dome and birth-of-the-stagecoach sort of painting, it rankled when it was first shown.

"View of the Merrimack River at Hudson, looking towards Nashua" graces City Hall in Nashua now. On loan for the show, summer squash, cut turf, and freshly turned earth offer myriad greens and pastoral grace. In a touch of humor, a Wizard of Oz-like funnel cloud lurks in the top left, a hint of danger and impossibility.

The canvas "View of Manchester" has a lovely documentary quality, capturing the Queen City from above Amoskeag Falls. The old green-arched bridge, dismantled in the 1980s in the name of progress, is apparent, and a skyline in which we'd no longer be able to place ourselves. The arc of the dam mirrors the arc of the sky, and Manchester sits within the ellipses like the iris and pupil of an eye.

a new relationship to air

A sojourn through Italy helped Aponovich through a difficult period in the mid-1990s. Feeling stifled artistically and no longer challenged by the still life, Aponovich traveled through Venice, Tuscany, Florence, Barga and Lucca, touring the land of some of his earliest influences. In Florence he encountered a 1466 portrait of the Duke of Urbino by Piero dell Francesca. The dignitary was painted in profile, his backdrop an expansive landscape, miles of mountainside, infinite sky, wind in the sails of ships in the bay, trees along the river. Aponovich realized he'd been cooped up too long painting interior spaces. He needed air.

The possibility of capturing inner and outer transforms his new work. He still loves his pinnacles and towers of compositional, found objects: colored marbles, shells, strung beads, silver sugar bowls (often spilled) and French press coffee pots, woven silks and red ribbons, iconic half-peeled oranges, cornucopic succulent soft fruits, all crowned with his brilliant flowers. And now they're all set in the sky, or framed by vaulted arches and loggia, terra cotta roofs, olive-groved hillsides and stuccoed villas.

A series from Barga is exquisite: "Still Life with Red Pears, 2002"; "Still Life with Bearded Irises, 2005"; "Still Life with Itoh Peonies, 2004." Aponovich tells the docents, "In Italy, I learned to paint air. ... When you're working on the sky or defining a distant hillside, the only thing between you and it is air. You load your brush, touch it to the canvas, and you're 30 miles away." The notion of this instant transport enthralls me and sheds new light on Sam Trioli's conversation about crispness. Rendering the air is about depth of field, something I've been curious about in Aponovich's still lifes. Some of the canvases have this paradoxical feel. You're simultaneously at great depth but on a singular plane. You're both present and at a great remove. It's part of their subtle tension.

color and ways of seeing

At the opening, I run into another NHIA painting student, fifth year senior Tom Ford. He's wide-eyed. Ford says of Aponovich, "I was stunned when I first saw his work, just stunned." Tom met Aponovich through Elizabeth Johansson, when James came to do a demonstration for her pastels drawing class. Tom jokes, "He said to me, 'Hey, nice ellipse. Now draw it again.' He told me later he hated drawing ellipses."

Their teasing early interactions set a kind of tone, an informal question and response that carried over a couple of years until Ford decided to ask Aponovich to be his senior year mentor. Ford is working on a life-size self-portrait. Having Aponovich in residence across the hall means "I can learn from watching him paint, the way he applies paint or mixes colors. Or the way he approaches or stages a painting... I can pick his brain with a question or problem." Ford faces an unusual challenge for an artist: partial colorblindness. Since some reds and greens elude him, he has real problems mixing flesh tones, yet was faced with composing his own face.

When he approached Aponovich about this, art history came to the rescue. "James laid it out for me very simply," Ford says. "Four tubes of paint give me 42 million colors-OK, I might be exaggerating a little. Naples yellow, terra rosa, oxide black and white. Call your black blue when you're mixing so you can get an orange, or a pink, or any flesh tone-that was how it was done in the Renaissance. For color experimentation, it opened a door, created a concrete plan for me." Then Aponovich was there with ongoing encouragement that Tom feels is intuitive. "He can tell me what he thinks is going on with a painting, make some suggestions, but he can also tell when I'm struggling to reconcile the advice with what I'm trying to do. He knows when to be quiet."

Aponovich also shared with Tom that he is blind in one eye. Ford recalls the wryness with which this "Aponovichism" was delivered: "I'm blind in one eye, and you don't see me crying." Learning this gives me a new way of seeing Aponovich's work, its surfaces and depths. His way of seeing, and not seeing, may lend itself to the ways he composes visually. He's remarked, "Perspective is a way an artist gets around in the world." Painting, he can place everything centrally and yet give it its own individuality.

the process of creativity

This spring, tulips, lilies and peonies will rise from the warming ground of the Aponovich/ Johansson garden in Hancock. In his home studio, Aponovich has about a dozen canvases going at once, and two or three in his Manchester studio. Lilacs will blossom and irises rise. Nasturtiums will bear their dew drops. Elizabeth and James have a "garden-to-canvas operation," says writer, historian and preservationist Howard Mansfield, in his essay for the Retrospective catalog. Literally thousands of bulbs bloom across the summer's continuum, making their way onto canvases in their seasonal rhythms. Mansfield observes "...French, Parrot, Rembrandt, and Triumph tulips... also peonies, delphiniums, phlox, and cornflowers, as well as annuals: sweet peas, zinnias, cosmos...." Aponovich paints with a cultivator's eyes and a gardener's attention. Johansson says that as her husband paints, he can let the flowers be their true selves. He's free to idealize. On canvas he can save the rosa rugosa from the Japanese beetle.

The painter's presence is often noted in reflections, and the man who is true to the highlight on the seed of a single raspberry or the blush on a Rainier cherry renders small portraits of himself, diligently putting brush to canvas. In one case he's captured his wife drawing him painting; the watcher being watched, the renderer being rendered in turn. These reflections offer the artist's presence to the dedicated viewer and honor the way a still life can be both lived in and an imaginative creation.

A wealth of surprises like this await visitors to the galleries. The Currier show has the tease of a few side-by-sides of studies and finished works, while some of the finished works will point toward their studies a few blocks away at the New Hampshire Institute of Art's "Process of Creativity" show in the Concord Street gallery. Aponovich is an excellent draftsman, and the works exhibited will be "rough sketches on cheap paper, graphite and charcoal drawings, some color studies," he says. "I'll have a partially finished painting that shows the foundation work. It will explain why, in some places, I use underpainting and in other parts of the painting, none at all. I think it will be very interesting for students." He adds, "This is no sad sister to the Currier show. There'll be new canvases there, some huge ones, 60 by 90 (inches). It will be very much complete, in its own right." Studies here will point North toward the Currier, referencing their finished works. For those interested in a peek backstage, Aponovich will give an Artist's Lecture at the New Hampshire Institute of Art on Thursday, April 14 at 5:30 p.m.