An Ahrtist at Harvard

The painting is shaped like the top of a piano, but at first glance you can tell that it isn't a piano. Hang so that the point faces down, the top fifth is a black stucco-like strip. The bottom, a triangle, is a mixture of grey, green and purple; all of which may add up to an upside-down sail, or as the artist. John Ahr '86 says, a type of a peepshow.

"Peepshow" is, in fact, the name of this painting, also entitled" Code 2," to indicate that is a part of Ahr's latest series, "Code" Ahr says he calls these works "painted structures [because] they're not just plain surfaces."

What they are, the explains, is "really a mixed media," since he uses applied canvas, wax, and modeling paste to create them "You somehow manage to create a really strong tension between the flatness of the canvas and the applied materials,' Ahr says.

"A lot of art is puzzling," he adds, "and I've capitalized on that. As a viewer, you're sort of involved in a puzzling message, trying to decode." Hence, the name for his latest series.

Ahr says that he works on one theme at a time, trying to synthesize a series. Sometimes, this means being very selective: "I see any you of an making as trial and error, but in my case, it's been more error than trial." Ahr spends an hour or two each day in the studio, but, he says, he doesn't think of himself as a painter until the "last hour, because that's when I put it all together."

Ahr completes ten to 15 paintings each year. He is unable to produce more because school takes up so much time. "Life in general and art-making are time- consuming,' he says. "You have to start early and be efficient."

He rues the last that he didn't begin early enough, first discovering painting in an art class in his sophomore year of high school in Sweden, where he was born. Before, he had been good at drawing; but, he adds, "that was the sort of skill you weren't supposed to be good at unless you drew boats and armies."

When he decided to come to Harvard. Ahr says that he had also decided that painting would be an extra-curricular activity. He opted to major in art history because "It's learning about the context of things. These paintings could possibly fit into the contest of 1985.

Although Ahr has taken some theoretical courses in the VES department, he says that he is intimidated by art teachers. "They are extremely interested in growth, seeing you do something good and simple at the beginning, and then something very complex at the end of the term."

But painting is well worth all this hard work for Ahr, who says that he eventually hopes to spend half his time teaching art history and the other half painting. "The day that I feel somehow as a painter I can be a little bit of a breadwinner it will be much easier to decide to be a painter. Before that. I wouldn't be living in reality to spend time dreaming about it."

Ahr explains, "Painting is a relief because you don't have to know any language, or you can know them all." He concludes, "What is so nice about painting is that you can look at it and take in everything at once. You can put something together, you can actually finish something you think is complete. You can make a sort of world."

Ahr adds that he doesn't see solitude as crucial for and artist.

"You have to concentrate hard, it takes a lot of time, and it smells bad."