Contributed by Alex Grimley / Unique among the twenty-odd paintings in Eric Aho’s exhibition “The Meadow’s Edge,” on view at DC Moore, is a grass-green landscape. While many of the exhibited works feature a shallow foreground, this scene is bright and open, incorporating a meadow dotted with dandelions and stretching back to a remote tree line. The picture’s title, Meadow Near Lincolnville, Maine (1954), refers to the year that artists Alex Katz and Lois Dodd purchased a home in that town, and, as Aho remarks, “embarked on a new chapter of American painting.” Katz and Aho share a compelling interest in what seeing feels like. I first saw Katz’s manifested in Twilight at the High Museum in Atlanta. There he evokes the condition of seeing in near total darkness with a ten-foot-tall black expanse that gives way only near the very top of the canvas, to a faint patch of sky through tree cover. Without representing any recognizable landscape elements, the painting records the experience of looking up at the night sky.
