Ben Aikin: Paintings

As I clear out my mother’s house, I’m faced with the quandary of what to do with my father’s paintings. I’ve gone through the racks in the garage and selected the very best items — about 20 of them. However, he tended to work large. I’d barely have room for 20 paintings in my house if they were miniatures. The first item I’m posting here, “Return of the King,” is fully six feet high.

My father was enormously interested in color, and I’m sure he’d be disappointed in how these works look after passing through the image capture of a $100 Kodak camera and then through the odd, non-linear processing supplied by your Internet browser software and computer operating system. Also, the camera introduces a little spherical aberration, which I’ve attempted to correct using the free Gimp image-processing software. Even so, I think these images reveal something basic about his work. I hope you enjoy seeing them!

This style has been called “synthetic cubism.” The debt to cubism is obvious, but there’s no overt subject matter. The figures in “Return of the King” may not be human. They may not be figures at all, though the presence of ovoids in the upper area does suggest that they have heads.

The next piece, “The Artisan,” is 4’7″ tall. It’s unframed.

Both of these works date from the late ’60s or early ’70s. Here’s an earlier work, “Nocturne,” from the 1950s. It’s 3’6″ wide and about 2′ high. The subtle colors in this painting didn’t photograph too well; I’ll have to take the photo again under better lighting conditions. Even so, this image may give you an idea what his work was about: the interplay of intersecting shapes. He worked hard to create a kind of visual ambiguity in which you could clearly see that the image was three-dimensional, but you could never be certain whether one shape was in front of or behind another shape. The optical energy of the paintings comes both from the color combinations and from the fact that the shapes never settle into a definite spatial relationship.

This next figure is smaller — about 19″ x 12″. It was painted directly on mat board.

And here’s another painting from the ’70s, “Hooded Figure.” This is 4 feet wide by 3 feet high. The orange, in particular, is not as vivid in real life as the digital reproduction makes it seem.

Here’s one of the few paintings he did that has a wide frame. It’s also one of the few that suggests motion. The canvas area of “Five Blue Circles” is about 19″ wide by 29″ high. The digital reproduction doesn’t do justice to the delicate shading of the browns.