Spotlight Reviews

NEW HAMPSHIRE

www.nhia.org


JAMES APONIVICH : A Retrospective

James Aponovich, Governor Stephen E. Merril, oil on canvas, 52 x 34", 2003.

   The Currier’s James Aponovich retrospective and a smaller show on the artist’s creative process at the nearby New Hampshire Institute of Art reveal the range of themes the artist has been exploring throughout his career.

Aponovich is a realist who specializes in large, complicated still lifes. Typically, the life-size flowers, fabric swatches, glass vases, china pieces, fruit, and eclectic souvenirs in his still lifes are perched on eye-level shelves and heaped in complex, centered, vertical compositions. The arrangements are bathed in a flat, even light. There is no visual narrative to be read in the chosen pictorial components or their relationships to each other.

The smaller exhibition provides a glimpse of the artist’s process. Aponovich employs a systematic approach that proceeds from concept and thumbnail sketch to a more developed drawing that is enlarged using a grid method into a final painting. Delicately toned graphite drawings, such as Eggplant and Pears (1983), reveal the artist’s technical control and visual sensitivity to minute value shifts.

Though still life is his primary genre, portraiture is a recurring theme in Aponovich’s oeuvre. A series of self-portraits done over the years documents a defensive man who faces the viewer but offers few of his thoughts or feelings. In one he stands in a leather motorcycle jacket with his arms crossed over his chest; in another he is working at his easel. The artist stares at us without expression. His palette knife, loaded with paint, juts straight toward us from the bottom center of the canvas. These are cool, emotionless images.

James Aponovich, Still Life with Sunflowers, oil on canvas, 60 x 40", 1990.

In contrast, we can’t help but project our empathy onto Portrait of Ana. The artist paints his young daughter in the throes of chemotherapy. The wall text mentions that this is a rare example of Aponovich imbuing the objects in the painting with symbolic meaning. Vulnerable, naked, and pale, Ana is seated in a draped chair facing forward but looking away. The white sheet over her chair suggests wings, and the African violets set on a shelf behind her refer to a medicine that might save her life. In recent works, such as Still Life with Helen Elizabeth Poppies, the artist sometimes includes a small portrait of himself in the act of painting, seen on the reflective surfaces of his vases.

Aponovich also paints local city scenes, rural vistas of the Merrimack River, Italian landscapes, and Down East islands. View of Blue Hills Bay, Maine is a quiet, evenly lit view of an unpeopled, perfect Maine island. More frequently, Aponovich incorporates landscapes into the still lifes. Painted after a trip to Italy, Barga Still Life with Red Parrot Tulips depicts rolling hills and orange-tiled roofs as a backdrop to an arrangement of raspberries, strawberries, and a tall vase of red tulips on a green marble pedestal. This is a relatively recent innovation, as earlier pieces such as Still Life with Chinese Hat have blank, featureless backgrounds. Dustan Knight