About The Artist

Ben Aronson is critically recognized as one of America’s most respected and evocative painters of the contemporary urban landscape. His work has been compared to that of Edward Hopper, Charles Wheeler and Fairfield Porter. His cityscapes convey a sensory experience of a captured moment by employing masterful combinations of impressionistic atmosphere, color, and light.

Aronson's signature synthesis of realism and abstraction expressively translates the everyday reality of metropolitan forms and life – rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, stop signs, and sidewalks – into a tableaux of urban geometry, motion, light, and shadow that uniquely compresses the spirit of a place. The artist’s expressive painterly style is characterized by fluid, yet restrained brushwork. “The main objective is not merely to capture physical likeness,” Aronson says, "but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience."

Aronson has been called a painter of the frozen moment. His works offer quiescent instants in space and time, allowing the viewer glorious moments of reflection. The paintings possess a remarkable capacity to suspend motion, slow the tempo, seduce attention, and liberate regard. In this work, Aronson dissolves the rush and tumult of everyday life to reveal the remaining fundament of beauty in these places and things. His paintings uncannily concentrate and epitomize visual resonances of the cityscape, whether it be New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Côte d’Azur, or any other place – and transform the everyday into orchestrations of inestimable beauty. Like the poetry of the place itself, his paintings inspire the mind and stir the heart.

Ben Aronson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1958. He received his MFA and BFA from Boston University. Aronson was the recipient of the prestigious 2006 Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Aronson’s ability to capture what Hassam called “humanity in motion” of the city, as well as the immediacy of its light and shadow, confers a kinship between Aronson’s work and that of the famous impressionist painter.

Aronson’s paintings are included in the permanent collections of more than fifty museums, including the De Young Museum, San Francisco; the National Academy Museum, New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Eli & Edythe Broad Museum, Michigan; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; among others.

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