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  This beautiful, deluxe 230-page art book features the work of major artist, Boston-born painter Aaron Fink. Eleanor Heartney, features writer for Art in America, has written the definitive essay on Aaron Fink's work around which the book is fashioned. The book contains 203 color plates each exhibiting Fink's expertise with paint, color, stroke and texture. The strength of this painterly skill in creating evocative illusions of form of ordinary commonplace objects draws a wide range of audience. Finks art appeals to a broad audience because of its subject matter while his technique and execution are widely regarded as masterful. Aaron Fink has gained recognition through the masterful painting of objects we all know, use and see daily. The universality of this subject matter i.e.: fruit, flowers, sandwiches, matrches, light bulbs, coffee cups, etc. coupled with his widely recognized artistic virtuosity within different media draws the viewer into a personal and intimate relationship with each work. Fink is in major museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Denver Museum of Art. Fink's work is also in collections of the New York Public Library, Sundance Institute, Paine Webber, Chase Bank, Citizens Bank, and Wellington Corporation. Eleanor Heartney is an independent art critic. A recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, she is a contributing editor to Art in America and Artpress. Her previous books are Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press) and Postmodernism (Tate Modern and Cambridge University Presses). 
  .hard press editions  A giant strawberry presses against the edges of a large canvas. Slightly elongated, it rests on its side with the indolence of a neo-classical odalisque; dabs of black paint become seeds punctuating its crimson skin, while the curling tips of the roughly brushed green cap coyly shield its gently rounded top from prying eyes. From a distance, the form is dazzling and lusciously solid. Close up, it dissolves into a heavily worked painted surface made of thick scumbles of vivid paint. Deeply scored sets of parallel lines cut into the image and ground, imparting life to otherwise buried layers of underpaint. Meanwhile a splash of solvent dissolves one section of the fruit into a river of flowing color. This monumental strawberry is the creation of painter, Aaron Fink. The world according to Fink is one in which things are not what they appear. At first glance one sees a lushly painted embodiment of sensuality and Eros. But upon closer inspection, we realize that it is embedded within a canvas which has been blotted, scraped, and otherwise manipulated. Initial sweetness masks an undercurrent of fundamental creative and sometimes violent forces. The explosive energy with which Fink literally attacks the canvas informs us that destruction is inherent in creation. For Fink, art is the progeny of a dynamic system in which change and metamorphosis are revealed through acts of deconstruction. The emotion in Fink's work is rooted in the apparent contradictions it sets up between artistic illusion and physical actions of the painter which simultaneously create and undermine that illusion. Fink isolates objects like this voluptuous berry, not to conjure a sense of their concreteness or physical reality, but to destabilize our sense of their place in the world. He makes us understand both how convincing and how unreal painted representations can be. Excerpt from the Introduction by Eleanor Hearney
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