Howard Hersh - Review - August, 1986

Howard Hersh

Painters have divergent styles, share strengths

by Amy Laurent
The New Mexican
Santa Fe, NM
August 29, 1986

Ralph Leon is a painter who works strictly in the realist tradition. In true abstract expressionist style, Howard Hersh is an artist who uses his canvas emotionally. What these two artists have in common is strength of technique and a strong feeling of their own presence in the work.

Howard Hersh is exhibiting monotypes at the Bank of Santa Fe through Sunday. In the tradition of pure abstract expressionism, Hersh employs purely elemental themes, relying on the canvas as an arena of charged activity.

Hersh is a romantic painter, trusting to his own instinct, alternately employing bright explosive forms and veiled color, which expresses nuance delicately.

Many of Hersh's monotypes are evocations of the landscape or of the female form as part of the environment. Those works which evoke the landscape typically employ a strong color background of blues or mauves or fascias, and at a point that would rest just below the horizon line, an explosion of volcanic and ethereal forms. In these monotypes, one feels the restless agitation of the artist.

Figurative abstractions such as Shescape or Silent Study, both 1986, rely more on delicate nuance of color and express the artist's harmony with the universe. Hersh seeks to extract the maximum dramatic effect from the simply massed, lush compositions of these abstract figures.

The artist's use of the monotype process combines the painterliness typical of abstract expressionism and the instantaneity of a printing process. Monoytypes are one-of-a-kind artworks made from paintings done on plexiglas or a smooth metal plate.


	Howard Hersh Painters have divergent styles, share strengths by Amy Laurent The New Mexican Santa Fe, NM August 29, 1986 Ralph Leon is a painter who works strictly in the realist tradition. In true abstract expressionist style, Howard Hersh is an artist who uses his canvas emotionally. What these two artists have in common is strength of technique and a strong feeling of their own presence in the work. Howard Hersh is exhibiting monotypes at the Bank of Santa Fe through Sunday. In the tradition of pure abstract expressionism, Hersh employs purely elemental themes, relying on the canvas as an arena of charged activity. Hersh is a romantic painter, trusting to his own instinct, alternately employing bright explosive forms and veiled color, which expresses nuance delicately. Many of Hersh's monotypes are evocations of the landscape or of the female form as part of the environment. Those works which evoke the landscape typically employ a strong color background of blues or mauves or fascias, and at a point that would rest just below the horizon line, an explosion of volcanic and ethereal forms. In these monotypes, one feels the restless agitation of the artist. Figurative abstractions such as Shescape or Silent Study, both 1986, rely more on delicate nuance of color and express the artist's harmony with the universe. Hersh seeks to extract the maximum dramatic effect from the simply massed, lush compositions of these abstract figures. The artist's use of the monotype process combines the painterliness typical of abstract expressionism and the instantaneity of a printing process. Monoytypes are one-of-a-kind artworks made from paintings done on plexiglas or a smooth metal plate.