Emerging Artists | Aron Belka - Southwest Art Magazine

Size is no limit

Aron Belka, Road to Camp, oil, 36 x 36.

This story was featured in the May 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

IF YOU WERE to view the diverse oeuvre of Aron Belka in person, one of the first things you’d immediately notice is the sheer size of most pieces. The New Orleans, LA, artist has portrayed everything from racehorses and their jockeys to shrimpers and their workboats, and some of these oil paintings measure more than 7 feet tall. In groups like the Portrait Society of America, Belka is making waves with his unusually large works; last year he garnered an exceptional merit award in the esteemed organization’s international competition. “I’m very open to experimenting and changing it up,” he explains, “because creatively, that’s what keeps me going.”

: Aron Belka, To Market, To Market, oil, 90 x 90.

: Aron Belka, Aaron Reichert, oil, 48 x 48.

: Aron Belka, Contact Tracing, oil, 80 x 80.

And his work is about more than portraits. For his recent solo exhibition at LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans, Belka completed a series of oils featuring the sea-sodden landscape along southern Louisiana’s coastline. Some of these Gulf Coast scenes stretch across his canvases at a panoramic scale of 2 by 7 feet or longer. For the artist, who also creates smaller pieces, tackling an expansive blank canvas is an exciting challenge, and working large can also be useful for drawing attention to subjects like the working-class people and overlooked heroes in our communities whom he frequently portrays. Some of Belka’s first large-scale pieces included a portrait of a West African man who worked with his wife, a field epidemiologist, as part of a contact-tracing team during the Ebola outbreak. He created a similarly large portrait of his wife to shine a spotlight, as he puts it, “on public health workers and the risks they are taking to help people.”

: Aron Belka, Gray Ghost, oil, 40 x 60.

: Aron Belka, John Isiah Walton, oil, 48 x 48.

: Aron Belka, Louisiana Fairy Tale, oil, 24 x 24.

A Salt Lake City, UT, native, Belka studied illustration and painting at Utah State University with “old-school illustrators” like respected western artist Glen Edwards (1935-2019). Today he brings a contemporary, partially abstracted style to his own representational works, which he creates using brushes, knives, squeegees, ink brayers, and scraping utensils to achieve strikingly varied marks and textures. In his recent landscape series, Belka found himself destroying the initial layers of oil paint on his surfaces and creating fresh new layers over them. “I separated from my wife last year,” says the artist, adding that they remain good friends. “So, these paintings have been an exercise in embracing change and new beginnings and accepting loss. The finished landscapes have all these windows to the bottom layers, leaving these unfinished areas that leave the history of the painting.” —Kim Agricola

representation
LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA; Quidley & Company, Nantucket, MA, Westport, CT, and Naples, FL; www.aronbelka.com.