Jan Aronson: Artist and Illustrator
When I interviewed Jan Aronson in 1967 for the Pioneer, she told me that she considered art to be the field where she was the most talented. Even at this age she had decided on a career in the fine arts. She said that painting provided a means of expression but more often for her it was simply a pleasure. Jan had been at Newman since kindergarten. Her view was that the superior standard of education at Newman was a stimulus to creativity because “the student who is better educated can see and interpret objects better.” Her favorite artistic medium at that time was charcoal because it "enabled her to draw strong shadows and lights." Jan has never stopped painting, and she has had an award-winning career as an artist.
Since Jan uses graphite to draw, I asked her to please explain the difference between graphite and the charcoal that she favored in high school. She explained that graphite, a crystalline form of carbon, is mixed with binders to produce different degrees of hardness that in turn produce varying shades of gray and black. Charcoal, on the other hand, is actual organic matter mixed with binders to produce sticks that are rather soft, messy, and highly breakable. Charcoal marks are broader than those made by graphite. She also paints in oil and watercolor, and you can see on her website, www.janaronson.com, that her work is organized by subject, like leaves or landscapes, and each subject is organized by the media, oil, graphite, watercolor, or pastel.
2005. Small Leaves #1. Graphite & Colored Pencil on Paper. Graphite allows Jan to "draw the strong shadows and lights" that she described in high school. This drawing is part of the Leaves series that Jan created after 9/11.
During the summer before our interview at Newman Jan had enrolled in a drawing class at Tulane. When she walked into the studio, she had an epiphany. She immediately felt, “This is my sanctuary. This is my calling.” Jan subsequently went to college at UNO. She lived at home and studied art. She painted all the time, including afternoons and weekends. She liked the Art Department at UNO, which now has an MFA program in art. For her science requirement she studied geology, as she has always liked rocks and maps, and especially the colors of maps. After college graduation with a BA in Fine Arts in 1971, Jan was accepted at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she majored in painting and minored in art history. Back in New Orleans after finishing her MFA in 1973, she taught painting at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Then for two-and-a-half years at Dillard University she was on the faculty as Instructor of Art and taught painting, drawing, art history, art appreciation, and freshman humanities.
Looking back at her time at Newman, Jan thinks that she was dyslexic. She recalls that one summer she was placed in a reading training program at Loyola. She states that she was always “terrible at languages.” In the competitive atmosphere of Newman, she unfortunately developed the idea that she was “stupid.” She felt like “a barbed-wire fence among a group of white-picket fences.” Her view of her abilities began to change at UNO, where she was placed in an Honors English class and began to read extensively.
In a sense, Jan knew herself well as a young person, even if she could not have fully articulated the reasons for her choice of profession at age sixteen. She gravitated toward the profession that suited her abilities and her personality. She recognized her calling, and she has created sanctuaries, places of quiet and creativity, for herself her whole life. Our class knows Jan as a person of tremendous energy. At Newman she was an athlete, participating in volleyball, basketball, track, and swimming. She was on the state swim team, and later she competed in triathlons.
Jan began painting landscapes during a 1985 trip to the deserts in Israel, and in 1986 she spent a month trekking in the Himalayas. As she predicted in high school, she has worked fulltime as an artist since 1986, with much of her work inspired by nature and by her extensive travels. She has had more than seventy solo and group exhibitions, including the Jan Van der Tege Museum in Amsterdam, the United Nations in Geneva, and the Museum at Hebrew Union College in New York, among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she first took art lessons as a child. You can begin to experience the extent of her work by going to her website.
1987 Sinai #7. Oil on canvas.
1986 Death Valley #9. Oil on canvas.
1989 Ladakh #7. Oil on canvas.
Her energy and drive have taken her all over the world. The landscapes of Israel, the Himalayas, Patagonia, Kenya, the Amazon, Anguilla, and the American Northwest have been sources of inspiration. Painting and drawing allow her to use this energy to express how she perceives her world, or, as she put it in 1967, “to see and interpret objects better.” Her work demands spending long periods of time alone in intense concentration, and she states that her introversion makes her very well suited to being alone in a studio while she paints and draws. The 2010 oil painting of water, shown below, evokes Jan's high level of energy.
2010 Water #29.
Jan feels that she inherited her father’s artistic side but not his math genius, and she added that all of her Aronson ancestors had painted and played music. Her father, Bernard J. Aronson (1919-1983), was an architect in the school of “Regional Modernism.” He graduated in architecture from Tulane University at age nineteen. He designed apartment complexes on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans as well as building individual homes in the region. During World War II he enlisted in the armed forces and worked in the Pacific in the field of cartography. A story that she heard from her older brother was that he earned a top-secret clearance and worked on the map that was used by the crew of the Enola Gay for the Hiroshima bomb.
Jan’s father’s parents had emigrated separately from Bialystok, which is now in Poland. Her great-grandfather was a cantor. Her father’s mother had been kidnapped on Shabbat and held for ransom, likely during a pogrom. Her maternal great-grandparents had previously immigrated to New Orleans, and her mother’s parents were born in New Orleans. She described the women in her mother’s family as “colorful,” and she related several stories about them that I decided to keep to myself. Jan was very fond of her maternal grandmother Alice, who liked to gamble and would take Jan to Las Vegas, where she saw among others on stage Sammy Davis Jr. and Barbra Streisand.
Like her father, Jan thinks and perceives visually. After the 9/11 terrorist attack, for example, she saw autumn leaves as a metaphor for heroic survivors. This led to a large body of work entitled, “Leaves,” including oil paintings, watercolors, and graphite drawings of leaves. You can see the evolution of leaves in her series of paintings and drawings. A reviewer of her work in 2005 wrote, “Seeing these autumn leaves as heroic survivors, lying on top of each other or gently touching with their edges curling up toward the light, Aronson was moved to paint them as signs of the fragility of life, and of beauty amidst destruction.” Jan saw them as “In memoriam, in homage to the tragedy.”
2004. Leaves #37. Oil on canvas.
2001. Leaf #1. Watercolor.
Leaves #37. Oil on Canvas.
2004. Leaves #21. Watercolor.
Jan's recent graphite rendition of the avalanche she experienced. She dedicated the work to Kay Lamberth and all those who have suffered with COVID19.
The avalanche of snow that poured through Jan's living room while she was seated there with her dog Hera.
Presently Jan is working on another body of work in response to trauma. In February 2019 Jan was in her home in Idaho talking on the phone when an avalanche came rushing through the house, exploding her bedroom. Snow filled the house, and Jan cut her hand as she dug through snow and shards of glass desperately trying to uncover her beloved dog Hera, who had been sleeping next to Jan in her dog bed. The First Responders found Hera, who had miraculously fled, upstairs in a bed.
Jan is creating a series of graphite drawings stemming from her experience of the avalanche. Interestingly, these are not her first drawings of an avalanche. She drew an avalanche in 1990 in her Patagonia Graphite Series, and in 1991 she painted an avalanche in white, gray, and black shades of oil. Her current portrayals of an avalanche are more abstract, conveying the actual experience of the shattering, splintering, and flying shards of glass. Jan said recently that her avalanche drawing is the "first time in nearly two years that she has incorporated the hint of the natural world in her work."
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Jan and Hera walking away from her home after the rescue.
For the first nine years of Jan’s adult life as an artist, Jan lived in a geodesic dome in Vermont with her first husband. She worked at any job she could find, and she got up at five am in order to paint. Eventually she left that lifestyle and moved on her own to be in New York City, the center of the American art world. On a blind date she met Edgar Bronfman Sr. in 1988. They married in 1994 and were together for 25 years until his death in 2013. Edgar was a major businessman, philanthropist, and author, and he was president of the World Jewish Congress from 1981 until 2007. In 1999 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, by US President Bill Clinton.
The Bronfman Haggadah, written by Edgar and illustrated by Jan. Published 2013.
Jan and Edgar with the Clintons.
Jan lecturing about her role in illustrating their joint creation.
Toward the end of his life, Jan and Edgar collaborated on The Bronfman Haggadah. Edgar wrote the words, and Jan told the Passover story in visual symbols, maps, patterns, and colors. You can see her watercolor illustrations on her website, www.janaronson.com, and you can listen to Jan and Edgar discussing their collaborative project:
The language of the Haggadah comes from Edgar, who viewed this Haggadah as an opportunity to teach young people the essence of Judaism, specifically the connection between freedom and morality. The freeing of slaves is the central theme, with Moses as “our own conscience.”
The project was different from Jan’s usual work in that she took nine months off from painting and immersed herself in abstract patterns and “ancient imagery for inspiration," including Egyptian tiles, Greek and Roman decorative painting, and African textiles. She feels she used different parts of her brain and that the experience was very freeing. She was intensely focused in a way that changed her life. She tapped into her longstanding love of maps and created a biblical map of the Exodus. Jan's unique contribution to Passover storytelling is that she has made the Exodus story visual so that the narrator's experience of reading a passage is accompanied by vivid patterns, colors, and illustrations.
Jan being filmed with the new book.
Jan's Biblical map of the Exodus, showing suspected and alternate routes.
The basket of Moses in a shallow pool on the edge of the Nile River.
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Jan's illustration of the plague of the frogs.
2015. Audubon, goshawk, & me. Graphite, watercolor, pencil and colored pencil on paper. In the "Me, Me With" series.
Jan has a relatively recent series of works, pictured on her website, called, "Me, Me With." I see Jan's great sense of humor in these portrayals of Jan with other artists. I selected Audubon, goshawk, & me because I loved the composition and its evocation of Louisiana. Jan and Audubon appear to be engaged in seriously thinking together.
And I loved Jan looking up at Leonardo with mountains in the background and colorful vegetables all around. Jan explained that each portrait is filled with fact-based images related to personal or professional aspects of the artist's life. Leonardo, for example, was a vegetarian, and Jan surrounded him with a variety of vegetables available in Italy.
2016. Leonardo & Me. Graphite and colored pencil on paper.
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Jan's work is about the interpretation of what she sees and perceives. She has referred to her landscapes as "portraits of place." In both her landscapes and her portraits she seems to go beneath the surface and look inside what she sees.
As the experience of illustrating the Haggadah was freeing, Jan at this point in her life feels free to be herself.
She recently married Dominique Finas, and she and her new spouse are living in Idaho. Jan feels a strong sense of responsibility for Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world.
Jan and Dominique at their pandemic wedding at the courthouse in Hailey, Idaho.