Biography from Museum of Nebraska Art:
| Born in Towanda, Kansas, Aaron Pyle was a painter of regional
landscapes who lived most of his life in Chappell,
Nebraska. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri
and adopted Benton's rhythmic style. He also did numerous
illustrations of Nebraska life and landscapes for the Omaha World Herald.
He died in Chappell, Nebraska in 1972.
The following information was written by Ron Roth, former director of the Museum of Nebraska Art.
The lead paragraph from a feature article in the Kansas City Star
from June 18, 1972 reads, "When an exhibition of paintings by Nebraska
artist Aaron Pyle opened in Kansas City recently, the artists was
unable to attend. He had his fields to Plow."
This is especially interesting because the Kansas City exhibition was
arranged and publicized by Pyle's former teacher friend and mentor, the
famous regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton.
Despite the success of the exhibition-the watercolors were selling for
$1,500--Pyle stayed home to tend his hogs, according to the Star
article. Pyle worked 128 acres of his family's original homestead
growing corn, alfalfa and wheat to feed his hogs, and some hay that he
sold to a nearby rancher.
Aaron Pyle is in the distinguished Nebraska tradition of
farmer/artist. Benton thought highly of his former student,
saying, "He, (Pyle), was a true regionalist, perhaps closer to being a
real one than any of the rest of us, for he lived continually with his
subjects. If I am considered the painter of Missouri, and grant
wood of Iowa, and John Stuart Curry is of Kansas, then as things now
stand, Aaron Pyle is definitely the painter of Nebraska." High praise
indeed from America's leading regionalist artist.
Pyle was raised in Chappell Nebraska, and returned there to farm after
attending art school in Seattle and studying with Benton in Kansas
City. The Museum of Nebraska Art maintains a significant
collection of his work. One of these, an oil painting titled Sledding,
is especially interesting to me. It is night and the full moon
peeks around a grove of trees lighting the rural landscape below.
A cozy farmhouse at the edge of the woods overlooks a steep hill down
which people are sledding.
One of the striking features of this oil painting is the feeling of
three dimensionality it achieves. Pyle was known to make
miniature clay models of his landscapes after he made sketches of the
scene he had in mind. He was a student of Cezanne's techniques,
achieving effects of depth and volume through the use of color, light
and shadow, rather than perspective or foreshortening. The effect
on the eye is akin to that of viewing a diorama.
It is a sophisticated technique summarized in the figure of the sledder
in the red outfit in the foreground. Pyle shades his red sledding
outfit with grays and blacks creating a palpable sense of volume.
He accentuate the three dimensionality through color. The red outfit,
contrasting sharply with the gray background of the slope, creates an
optical illusion--the outfit seems to the eye to pop out of the canvas
at the viewer.
But what really delights me about this painting has nothing to do with
color or effects of volume. There is a zany, macabre mood in this
landscape. The peach tinted grays and browns of the dead bushes
and grasses are spectral and otherworldly. The sliders are the
country cousins of the Addams family with their darkened eyes and
vague, grim expressions, careening down the slope, driven by demons-the
serious work of sledding is upon them. The subheading for this
painting might be the Waltons in purgatory. I say this, by the way,
strictly in admiration. Pyle's vision goes against the grain of
the prettified, idealized and contrived bliss of rural life, and takes
us to a much more interesting if disquieting place, on the outskirts of
a nightmare.
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