Jeff Aeling is an American. He is an American painter. He is an American painter of American landscapes. But his paintings are not about predestination or the fertility of American soil or the wonder of its natural expressions or beautiful exceptionalism. Church and Bierstadt do this. They paint the material glories of the American plate. They enumerate its possessions and exalt them: they are wonderful, rare, and glorious. This, one might say, is the heart, the essence of the tradition of American landscape painting. Because Jeff Aeling is an American, an American painter, an American painter painting American landscapes, his work is easily and carelessly collected beneath these sweeping assumptions. However, while it may be that his work is about individualism—in the sense of experience, rather than self-determination—and while his work is about the relationship of the individual to what he surveys—in the sense of contemplation rather than conquest—his work may be said, in that literary sense, to be American—because it is about man versus nature, rather than the European, man versus man. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally distinct from the tradition of American meanings. One may say that his work is rather more touched by the European landscape tradition—appreciation, fear, suspicious regard—and brought to bear upon the panoramic, deceptive, transitory, gently rolling geography of American experience: primarily, that of the untrafficked American heartland.