By Jeff Aeling
Located in Chicago, IL
Aeling’s affinity for the Great Plains—rooted in decades of traveling the Dakotas, Wyoming, and eastern Colorado—emerges in this broad expanse of snow under a crystalline winter sky. The almost abstract simplicity of the forms recalls the painter’s belief that landscape can be reduced to elemental relationships: light to shadow, land to air, distance to nearness. The softness of the snow’s surface belies the severity of the environment. As in many of his winter scenes, Aeling captures both the emptiness and the quiet majesty of western space.
Jeff Aeling
Meadow in Snow
Oil on panel
24h x 36w in
60.96h x 91.44w cm
JAE043
Jeff Aeling (1958–2025): The Sky Remembers
Through Jeff Aeling’s eyes, the landscape becomes a world shaped as much by air as by earth. In works such as North of Las Vegas, NM and Pond Near St. Cloud, MN, he balances the quiet structure of plains and wetlands with skies alive in constant motion. His mastery of atmosphere is unmistakable in Light Pillars (2023) and Light Pillar (2023), where rare optical events turn night into architecture. Even intimate scenes like Crabapple, Dogwoods, and Red Bud find their emotional power under skies that lend the land its shifting character.
Aeling’s winters in Hawaii deepened his sensitivity to movement and weather. Surfing taught him to read the rhythm of the ocean, a knowledge reflected in Wave, Kauai (2018), where a breaking wave becomes a luminous wall of force. In Volcano (2023), he channels the islands’ elemental drama, linking fire, vapor, and sky through the same atmospheric vocabulary found in his plains paintings...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Landscape Paintings