^{Chatham Pier Trawler (24×36”, oil on wood panel)}

Aron Belka’s Maritime Patterns

by Rebecca M. Alvin

When an artist takes the natural landscape as their subject, it’s a conversation, not simply a representation of what the eye sees. In an age where photography has become a constant activity as we all carry cameras in our phones now, the distinction between documenting what we see and saying something about what we see is an important one; we can all take an accurate photo of a scene in nature, but an artist brings something to the scene beyond what’s literally visible. 

Aron Belka’s paintings of maritime subjects—whether the rocky coast of western Ireland or boats out of Chatham Harbor here on the Cape, don’t just document reality. These paintings are both imbued with a strong sense of the places they portray and offered for us to observe self-consciously, as we visually wade through the marks on the wood panels, coming to a greater understanding of the environments portrayed.

“I’m a painter. I’m very interested in marks and mark-making, and patterns, and playing with those patterns in paint,” Belka explains. “I’m obviously representational, but I used to do a lot of abstract work. When I lived in Albany, I was actually just doing abstract work, and then when I moved to New Orleans, I kind of went back to representational subjects. And so, some of the abstract style kind of flowed through into my current representational work.”

Belka has moved around a lot. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, he left for Portland, Oregon, right after earning his BFA from Utah State University. Then he lived in Albany, New York, for a time, eventually ending up in New Orleans, for what he and his wife thought would be a short stint while she went to graduate school. They stayed longer than expected when Hurricane Katrina hit, extending the amount of time needed to complete her graduate degree. In the mean time they had children and put down roots, and now it’s turned out to be home. But in between and after all of that, Belka traveled around the world painting what he saw—and what he felt about what he saw—including residencies in 2019 and 2022 at the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in County Kerry, Ireland, where a number of the works in his show Maritime Patterns, now on view at William Scott Gallery, were created.

“I went in December, and the weather was very dramatic, which I just loved. because it just created these really dramatic landscape scenes. And so that was a huge influence,” he recalls. And being in a place where culturally, the land is such an important component of one’s identity, also made its mark on Belka, prompting him to create a series he showed in New Orleans called Kelp and Potatoes, in which Irish identity and Belka’s own fluid style merged. “It is the sea and the land that they are very much tied to and it has a huge impact for them, culturally. And so when I was there, again, I was there kind of in the winter and the sun was very low. And so it kind of created these really long shadows. And I was very fascinated by just almost the bending of the light because the sun was so low. And so in some of the paintings that I did, I was kind of playing with that in the landscape, where I was actually bending the landscape in these very unnatural ways…playing with the imagery with the subjects and the marks.”

When you enter the William Scott Gallery, the front room is devoted to Belka’s work, with Chatham Pier Trawler front and center and paintings of coastal scenes on the walls surrounding it. These are smaller works than Belka is known for in New Orleans, where he has been lauded for his large-scale portraits, as well as his landscapes. Some of the work on display here in Provincetown depicts New England fishing boats, some cottages in Nova Scotia, and then there are those depicting rural Irish scenes where one or two homes are dwarfed by epic cliffs and greenery on one side, and the sea on the other. In all, the painter’s marks establish a kind of distance as they separate us from the subject matter, as though we are looking through a window with smudges on it—not a part of the scene, so much as a witness to it. The technique reflects Belka’s background as a painter who started out working in abstraction and then began to paint representational images as a way to get his work seen by a wider audience. But whether it’s a portrait or a rural scene, for Belka, it’s about the paint, not the subject matter. These swirling, smudging marks abstract the literal reality and instigate a multidimensional dialogue with the world around us.

“When I’m in the process, there’s always kind of that dialogue with the painting, where things are sort of constantly changing. And I’m experimenting and deciding maybe what I had in my mind didn’t work and I’m trying something else….There is a plan, but the dialogue always kind of directs it in different ways,” he explains. He also likes to leave in layers that can be perceived by the viewer, sort of windows into the process.

Belka says he has not yet spent adequate time on the Outer Cape to understand our unique environment enough to start painting it, although he has painted other Cape subjects. He says he hopes to spend more time around here eventually. One wonders what the dunes of North Truro and Provincetown would look like with his painterly approach.

Aron Belka’s work is presented in Maritime Patterns, on view at William Scott Gallery, 439 Commercial St., Provincetown, through June 10. For more information, call 508.487.4040 or visit williamscottgallery.com.