By Jeff Aeling
Located in Chicago, IL
This scene echoes Aeling’s earlier years exploring Yellowstone and the northern Rockies, where geothermal landscapes and severe winters formed a visual laboratory for him. The stark verticals of dead trees rising through steam and snow evoke the quiet violence of natural forces—eruption, freeze, regrowth. Aeling often spoke of landscapes as records of time, and this painting exemplifies that belief: it is both serene and charged with memory, documenting a terrain shaped by fire, water, and cold.
That sense of elemental transformation is deepened by the medium itself. This is the only encaustic painting found in his studio following his death—a rare departure from his familiar oil technique. The wax-based process, involving heat, layering, and an almost geological buildup of surface, mirrors the very forces depicted in the scene. It stands as a singular artifact in his oeuvre, a final and poignant testament to his fascination with how material, time, and natural forces converge.
Jeff Aeling
Pine Trunks and Mineral Springs, Yellowstone
encaustic on panel
48h x 34w in
121.92h x 86.36w cm
JAE041
Jeff Aeling (1958–2025): The Sky Remembers
Through Jeff Aeling’s eyes, the landscape becomes a world shaped as much by air as by earth. In works such as North of Las Vegas, NM and Pond Near St. Cloud, MN, he balances the quiet structure of plains and wetlands with skies alive in constant motion. His mastery of atmosphere is unmistakable in Light Pillars (2023) and Light Pillar (2023), where rare optical events turn night into architecture. Even intimate scenes like Crabapple, Dogwoods, and Red Bud find their emotional power under skies that lend the land its shifting character.
Aeling’s winters in Hawaii deepened his sensitivity to movement and weather. Surfing taught him to read the rhythm of the ocean, a knowledge reflected in Wave, Kauai (2018), where a breaking wave becomes a luminous wall of force. In Volcano (2023), he channels the islands’ elemental drama, linking fire, vapor, and sky through the same atmospheric vocabulary found in his plains paintings...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Panel Paintings
MaterialsPanel, Encaustic
