Endowing her subjects with an almost supernatural uniqueness, while retaining the factual data that she obtains from photographs, Jan Aronson creates portraits of mountains, deserts, creeks, clouds, leaves, and people. The images are selected and composed (for the most part) through the lens of her camera, and then transformed by oil on canvas -- as well as by watercolor or pastel on paper -- to reveal her own way of seeing and her sensual engagement with the act of painting. Like many twenty- first century realists, Aronson's work is more about ways of seeing than about what is represented.

Jan Aronson is equally a realist, formalist, and an abstract painter in her methods and concerns. She perceives and intensifies the abstract quality of form color and light that she sees in natural phenomena. Selecting subjects that are meaningful to her, she paints to find out what will happen in the course of translating reality from photos and personal associations into art. This time consuming, highly skilled process is a defiant assertion of traditional artistic craft in an age of virtual reality. Recalling a statement by Dorothea Rockburn that "a painting is finished when it speaks to me," Aronson believes that she knows when a work is done because it separates from you when you have given it everything you have to give.

- Miranda McClintic

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