JESSE AARON

First published: Winter 2024/2025

For Jesse Aaron, the trees of his Florida homeland were his muses, resulting in carved sculptures that possess an uncanny sense of being and individuality

As much as the divine calling to become a sculptor that he experienced one morning in 1968, Jesse Aaron was guided by the wood itself. Responding to the knotty whorls, knobs from snapped branches, and grain of oak, cedar and cypress that he found in the area around his home in Gainesville, Florida, he claimed to only bring out a presence that was already there. Faces appear to grow out of weathered trunks; dogs, birds and even a shark seem to have come to life out of roughly hewn logs. “God put the faces in the wood,” he once stated. “Don’t bring me a piece of wood and ask me to carve something out of it. ‘Cause I won't. Don’t tell me what you want, it might not be there, you understand?”

Aaron in 1976; photo: Peggy A Bulger; State Library and Archives of Florida

In the same year that Aaron awoke to a new life as an artist, Stuart Purser, a University of Florida art professor, happened to be driving through Gainesville and spotted a colossal wooden head. He stopped and was awed both by the craggy carved visage and by the man in his early eighties who was sitting in a purple rocking chair on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe with work-worn hands. Although Aaron had only recently turned his focus to art, he had just installed a couple of hand-lettered signs declaring “Jesse J Aaron, Sculptor” and “Jesse J Aaron Museum” . Purser bought the wooden head and, before long, returned to see Aaron, becoming a friend and an early advocate for his art and inviting him to be part of an exhibition at the University of Florida that showcased Aaron’s sculptures alongside Purser’s own drawings.

Untitled, between 1968 and 1979; courtesy: American Folk Art Museum

In his 1975 book, Jesse J. Aaron: Sculptor, Purser wrote of the “honesty of purpose” that he found so compelling about the self-taught artist’s work: “His respect for individuality extends into his use of materials. He often says, ‘The wood will tell you what to do.’” Born in 1887 in Lake City, Florida, Aaron said that he had both enslaved ancestors as well as Seminole heritage. One of twelve children, he started working at a young age to help support his family – first as a field hand then, over the years, as a baker, a farm labourer, and a cook on the Seaboard Coastline Railroad and in the Hotel Thomas in Gainesville (now the Historic Thomas Center which has since exhibited Aaron’s art).