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James Aponovich
American 20th - 21st Centuries Painter
American, b. 1948
Born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1948, James Aponovich began to exhibit his paintings and drawings following his student days at the University of New Hampshire at Durham. In 1976, he held his first significant solo show at New England College. Since then, he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe. The artist has remained closely attached to New Hampshire, however, and at present he continues to live and work in Hancock.

Still life painting has been the dominant theme in Aponovich’s oeuvre and is the genre for which he is today best known. Yet the artist has continually experimented with other kinds of imagery, including portraiture, figure drawing, and landscape. In the early phase of his career, during the 1970s, Aponovich essayed original still life paintings whose unusual arrangements and viewpoints put the viewer in mind of contemporary photographs by such masters as Paul Strand and Edward Weston. Appearing around the same time, meticulous pencil drawings of trees, figures, and architectural subjects testify to the artist’s powerful drive to record the beauty of the physical world. A series of nudes, both painted and drawn, point to Aponovich’s early and lasting concern with the nuances of the human form and his determination to become a master draftsman. By the early 1980s, Aponovich had begun to delve more deeply into still life, creating sharply focused and jewel-like compositions that brought him increased attention from the art world. Portraiture and landscape retained a prominent place, however, as evinced by the artist’s self-portraits and a series of remarkable views of urban New Hampshire executed in 1987. In recent years, Aponovich has sought to combine his focus on still life and landscape, devising fantastic groupings of objects set against expansive scenes of the Italian countryside. As a portraitist, Aponovich remains equally committed, as seen in his 2003 portrait of former New Hampshire governor Stephen Merrill.

Whether still life, portraiture, or landscape, Aponovich’s work is unified in its attempt to strike a balance between apparent reality and a personal fantasy that is shaped by classical ideals of beauty. Although Aponovich adheres to traditional genres, his subjects are frequently presented in unexpected, often whimsical ways. Forgoing old artistic conventions, Aponovich brings together unrelated elements to create thought-provoking works that sidestep any obvious symbolism or logical narrative. In a similar manner, space and perspective are subtly altered, lending surrealistic energy to otherwise orthodox compositions. Despite these departures from the norm, however, the intensity with which Aponovich delineates his subjects persuades the viewer of the truth of his work, and ultimately, his vision.

Introduction to the catalogue for the CMA organized exhibition "James Aponovich: A Retrospective" March 18 - June 20, 2005, written by Kurt Sundstrom, Curator, Currier Museum of Art.