Thomas D. Aaron

THOMAS D. AARON {www.thomasdaaron.com} lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Michael, and daughter. He sees his abstract paintings as having roots and perhaps a destination in the land￾scape of the Southwest and comments: “I am searching for a way to move toward my experience of homecoming—not as a corporeal matter but a conscious one. Raised in the West, I was given the privileges, experience, and baggage that comes from the western ethos. Themes of conquest, brutality, reinvention, self-determina￾tion, triumph, and redemption are interleafed in the western myth, yet underlying it all is a narrative of land—of space. “My conscious wanderings have always led to me to desire lands and spaces far from my home; but recently, I have felt an ir￾resistible pull toward the land—not a simulacrum of pretty views but an investigation into the unsympathetic disconnected pat￾terns and layers of people on the land, viewed as an expression of time. I articulate those patterns as the vastness of space constantly interrupted by our hand—as layer over layer, a palimpsest, as use and reuse, cultivation and fallowing. This new awareness of the land and my place in it was a threshold experience, propelling me into a new sphere. “My artistic process is not dissimilar to my content. I reference papers on mathematical theory in urban planning, old city plats, found photographs, thousands of aerial images culled from our vast media universe as well as time spent in the landscape observ￾ing the patterns and underlying structure of human involvement on the land. Beyond traditional painting and drawing mediums, I incorporate raw materials: sand, coal, salt, iron, copper, and sil￾ver. My approach is intuitive. I just start—make a move, not unlike the surrealist notion of automatic drawing that begins a back-and￾forth of layers, responses to former movements and obliteration of others. Eventually the automatic is left behind for more precise formalist conventions of abstraction.”