Salish Chief Dan George (1899-1981) said, “One thing to remember is to talk to the animals. If you do, they will talk back to you. But if you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.”
Maurauders, oil, 28 x 40”
Edward Aldrich invites us to talk to the animals he paints—not because he portrays them as if they were lesser humans but because he paints them as they are. “I’ve been painting animal portraits since high school,” he explains. “I paint what I see. I don’t give them an expression. They’re so amazing on their own I just express what’s there.” What’s there is a deep kinship that we have forgotten.
Tentative Steps, oil, 72 x 48”
Aldrich paints the action of light on fur and feathers that animates “the solidity of form underneath” he says. “I’ve experimented with painting looser and painting tighter and learned that an abundance of detail is kind of trite if you don’t have the form. You don’t have the real richness of the animal. You just have surface.”
In Bed of Grass, the play of light does extraordinary things. It creates an anchoring diagonal as it sweeps across the long grass while creating warm tones under the swan’s wings. It brings out color in the white feathers. “There are so many colors in the whites,” he exclaims, “the blues reflected from the sky, the tans from the grass. It all combines to make up the form.”
Bed of Grass, oil, 14 x 18”
Russett Tones, oil, 10 x 16”
Bed of Grass is a relatively small, intimate, painting at 14 by 18 inches. Not only is the wolf imposing in Tentative Steps but it has a pronounced presence in a canvas 6 feet tall by 4 feet wide. Aldrich examines what light does to and through the animal’s fur. In another painting of three timberwolves, Marauders, a shaft of light illuminate’s the white wolf’s paw and a rock. A thicker impasto of paint in the whites and a softer background brings life to the surface as well as to the animals themselves. The painting came together over several years from five separate photographs, the light and the size and location of the animals changing over time until it all coalesced into an image of three wolves ready for confrontation or, perhaps, for conversation.
These and other recent paintings will be in a one-man show at Mountain Trails Gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, June 16 through 30. —
UPCOMING SHOW
Up to 12 works
June 16-30, 2021
Mountain Trails Gallery
155 Center Street, Jackson, WY 83001
(307) 734-8150, www.mtntrails.net
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