Aaron Pyle: Farmer/Artist A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director 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 Americas 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 C6zanne'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.