Picturing Places and Spaces

Aro's small watercolor is divided into three zones: a realistic apricot with stem and leaves at the bottom; a view of a mountainous landscape at night in the center; and a graphite image of a curtained window at the top. The apricot is positioned on a surface like a table. Light from the left reveals its shape and texture, and a shadow appears under it. Its leaves are beginning to curl, but one might be tempted to pluck the ripe apricot off the table and eat it. The landscape is not as accessible because the viewer seems to be positioned very far from the mountains illuminated by a full moon. The window, rendered in shades of gray, floats over the variegated watercolor wash of warm tones. A gentle breeze ruffles the suspended curtain, and a staircase becomes visible for the moment. Aro explained that the stairway "suggests passage into a faint dream or remembrance," and her combination of these images "suggests the present, the past, and the once imagined, here captured in layers, time overlapping."

Born in Detroit, Mary Aro received her MFA from Wayne State University in 1982. After graduating, Aro studied with Jeanne Duvall in the school of the La Napoule Art Foundation in France where she developed her interest in painting outdoors. Upon her return to the United States and while at her summer home in Maine, she began painting local landscapes in a wide format that was small in scale. While painting these miniatures, she often picked up rocks or twigs at the site. She studied them at home and added them below the landscape. She explained: "The distant views set the viewer apart from the land. The painted object represents the memory a vacationer might keep as a reminder of the beauty of the land . . . ." In her early 90s, Aro continues to paint outdoors along with her close study of objects at home. Recently her concern about the environment was evident in her award-winning paintings of waste transfer stations where refuse piles up and sometimes is burned. During the pandemic, Aro focused on everyday objects discarded as trash in her life-size watercolor paintings."