Howard Hersh - Review - August, 1995

Howard Hersh

Resurrecting Nature

From the catalog of the Shidoni Gallery exhibitions, Tesuque, NM (Sept.–Oct. 1995) and Joanne Chappell Gallery, San Francisco, CA (Oct.–Nov. 1995)

From the moment a wounded bison was first depicted at Altamira or a hunt magically evoked on cave walls at Lascaux, art and nature have been so intimately linked that it has been impossible to extricate one from the other. Such cosmic linking—the interrelationship of things—is the subject of new work by the artist Howard Hersh, a series of paintings inspired by the austere photographs of Karl Blossfeldt. Under magnification, Blossfeldt's botanical forms resembled the shapes and structures of man's architecture, art, and designs and affirmed that art has intuitively and subconsciously always mirrored nature.

Herein lies the essential harmony of much botanical art - a form which originated in China at the beginning of the 10th Century A.D. - with an artist whose early studies of the stems, branches, twigs, and leaves of the bamboo plant were tendered so sensitively in relation to their surroundings, they implied that "nature... existed within... as well as outside, [and was] an ever changing element of.. [one's] own consciousness." (Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting, London: Lund, Humphries and Co., Ltd., 1956, it).

Hersh's amber-lit images carry us beyond the threshold of our own contemporaneity into a cosmic silence. The softness which pervades them and their tendency toward monochromism recall the elegant and precise studies in grisaille or cirage by such masters as Leonardo, the father of modern botany, whose talent as an artist was matched only by an equally prodigious talent for looking at affinities in nature.

Japanese art of the Edo period also comes to mind-the screens and scrolls in gold and celadon green of early Kabuki theater, the gold screen of iris by Korin. (It is the golden cast, the veiling, the negative space that absorb Hersh.) And the eerie, gold-and-aubergine abstractions by Albert Ryder who has probably influenced more contemporary painters, by some strange anomaly of reason, than any other artist on either side of the Atlantic.

Hersh drew obsessively as a child. Drawing, even now, is an essential part of his work; in fact, the foundation of it. Hence, his enthusiasm for the seemingly endless supply of Blossfeldt photographs—"dozens and dozens of them that I could draw from." But the delicate softness of Hersh's drawn images imply the exact opposite of Blossfeldt's emphatic, crisp stark edges and clear definitions which made his work so popular in the wave of "New Objectivity" that swept Germany in the 1920's.

The scale of Blossfeldt's images was clearly seductive. Hersh saw it as a form of abstraction. The 7x to 27x magnification revealed the minuscule perfection of plant forms, their complexity, order and pattern, recalling the Flower Sermon in which the Buddha silently extended to his audience a flower. The message, of course, was clear; the wordless discourse on the language of pattern implied a unity and order common not only to all flowers but to all things.

Hersh admits he has a great affinity with photographers. In particular, he is impressed with the atmospheric work of Linda Connor who uses a Century 8 x 10 view camera with a soft-focus "semi-achromatic" portrait lens popular at the turn of the century.

Jim Dine is also a major presence, and there are many reasons for this. For one, Dine's "metamorphosis" since the 1970's from an artist-scavenger and manipulator of found objects and emblematic images into a keen observer of nature" and supreme draftsman of botanical studies is significant (Marco Livingstone, Jim Dine-Flowers and Plants, New York: Abrams, Inc., 1993, II). It parallels Hersh's departure from the alchemy of encaustics, in which process was content, to oils, in which the process of nature is content; from figuration to nature, and from studies inspired by biology to botany.

Hersh's passion for nature was determined between the ages of two and eight. ("It was the best period of my childhood.") He lived in a Long Island development surrounded by forest, "from my memory, an endless forest. Even today I could still draw a map of every path and fork in the trails." In 1969, he made a pilgrimage from the urban density of southern California to the northern New Mexico countryside. This approchement with nature was vital to in his development as an artist. In New Mexico, he learned from the old people a respect and reverence for the land and the old ways. "I could never have gotten this from art school or by connecting to the art scene."

But family lore of a Rumanian grandfather may be a central element in his artistic motivation:

In 1905 at the age of fourteen, my Rumanian grandfather Herscovici was left on the streets of New York City by parents who had booked passage to America but, unable to afford the entry tariff for themselves, were forced to return home. Apprenticed two years earlier to an itinerant portrait painter in Rumania, Grandfather was enterprising, determined to survive in America and to become an artist. Eventually, he moved to Chicago, putting himself through the Chicago Art Institute with a grueling factory job. He married and became the paterfamilias, but the lack of finances provoked a breakdown. A doctor advised him to give up one of his occupations; his sense of familial duty dictated that he abandon art. So, one day, he piled up all his canvases and equipment and set fire to them. A short time after, at the age of forty-four, he died of a stroke.

While a studio move to the country inspired the subject matter of this series, monotypes often lead Hersh's work and become a proving ground for the further exploration of ideas on canvas. They even suggested a recent series of intimate, traditional Japanese woodblock prints that relate to the botanical paintings. The layering of color in the monotype process as well as the use of transparent washes for the woodblock prints is particularly evident in the botanical canvases which have been primed, underpainted, scumbled and then repeatedly glazed. The glazing process contributes to their luminosity imbuing them with otherworldliness.

The images which are most successful attain a presence not unlike 10th Century stained glass. There is a feeling of illumination, saturation, staining, dyeing, bleeding, suffusion of color; the brushwork is almost invisible. Timelessness is another component reflected in the ambiguous space in which many of these images float or are suspended. Hersh has never anchored his paintings with a horizon line, and the volumetric treatment of Clematis, Primrose, Cephalaria, Fennel and Loasaceae augment their ascent toward surreality.

There is shading and modeling, as in grisaille, but the essential light source (the result of glazing) seems to come from inside the plant, from the plant's own energy. With Heath, for example, the pulsing flower buds are so infused with light, they illuminate their own micro universe. (One may recall the photographs by Walter Chappell who used the plant's own energy to develop the negative images.) A single red dot implodes the aloe green of Lime Mallow with a sense of the sacred; white dots infuse Fennel and Primrose with a mysterious ambent energy reminiscent of the giant seedlings in the 13th Century manuscript, Carmina Burana.

As any complex subject might, these botanical images have footnotes-architectural references, references to manmade structures, surprising overlays of color which suggest the discontinuities and vulnerability of the artist as man. The partial grid obscuring Highbush is one example: the overlay of alizarin crimson upon the sulphured fruit pods, the white handle that mirrors its black stem. The metallic adornment of the stout Pumpkin Tendril is another, while the abstracted grid of color that mirrors Lime Mallow also refutes it.

Is the return to the harmony of botanical forms a refuge from the noise, frenzy and disharmony of contemporary life? These images have, after all, risen phoenix-like from the bonfire of Grandfather Herscovici's dreams. Their strength may be that they imply not only microcosm but macrocosm; that in their glowing, floating jettison into artistic space, they become transcendent,iconic transfigurations of nature itself.

M. Terence McKay
Santa Fe, New Mexico
August, 1995


	Howard Hersh Resurrecting Nature From the catalog of the Shidoni Gallery exhibitions, Tesuque, NM (Sept.–Oct. 1995) and Joanne Chappell Gallery, San Francisco, CA (Oct.–Nov. 1995) From the moment a wounded bison was first depicted at Altamira or a hunt magically evoked on cave walls at Lascaux, art and nature have been so intimately linked that it has been impossible to extricate one from the other. Such cosmic linking—the interrelationship of things—is the subject of new work by the artist Howard Hersh, a series of paintings inspired by the austere photographs of Karl Blossfeldt. Under magnification, Blossfeldt's botanical forms resembled the shapes and structures of man's architecture, art, and designs and affirmed that art has intuitively and subconsciously always mirrored nature. Herein lies the essential harmony of much botanical art - a form which originated in China at the beginning of the 10th Century A.D. - with an artist whose early studies of the stems, branches, twigs, and leaves of the bamboo plant were tendered so sensitively in relation to their surroundings, they implied that "nature... existed within... as well as outside, [and was] an ever changing element of.. [one's] own consciousness." (Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting, London: Lund, Humphries and Co., Ltd., 1956, it). Hersh's amber-lit images carry us beyond the threshold of our own contemporaneity into a cosmic silence. The softness which pervades them and their tendency toward monochromism recall the elegant and precise studies in grisaille or cirage by such masters as Leonardo, the father of modern botany, whose talent as an artist was matched only by an equally prodigious talent for looking at affinities in nature. Japanese art of the Edo period also comes to mind-the screens and scrolls in gold and celadon green of early Kabuki theater, the gold screen of iris by Korin. (It is the golden cast, the veiling, the negative space that absorb Hersh.) And the eerie, gold-and-aubergine abstractions by Albert Ryder who has probably influenced more contemporary painters, by some strange anomaly of reason, than any other artist on either side of the Atlantic. Hersh drew obsessively as a child. Drawing, even now, is an essential part of his work; in fact, the foundation of it. Hence, his enthusiasm for the seemingly endless supply of Blossfeldt photographs—"dozens and dozens of them that I could draw from." But the delicate softness of Hersh's drawn images imply the exact opposite of Blossfeldt's emphatic, crisp stark edges and clear definitions which made his work so popular in the wave of "New Objectivity" that swept Germany in the 1920's. The scale of Blossfeldt's images was clearly seductive. Hersh saw it as a form of abstraction. The 7x to 27x magnification revealed the minuscule perfection of plant forms, their complexity, order and pattern, recalling the Flower Sermon in which the Buddha silently extended to his audience a flower. The message, of course, was clear; the wordless discourse on the language of pattern implied a unity and order common not only to all flowers but to all things. Hersh admits he has a great affinity with photographers. In particular, he is impressed with the atmospheric work of Linda Connor who uses a Century 8 x 10 view camera with a soft-focus "semi-achromatic" portrait lens popular at the turn of the century. Jim Dine is also a major presence, and there are many reasons for this. For one, Dine's "metamorphosis" since the 1970's from an artist-scavenger and manipulator of found objects and emblematic images into a keen observer of nature" and supreme draftsman of botanical studies is significant (Marco Livingstone, Jim Dine-Flowers and Plants, New York: Abrams, Inc., 1993, II). It parallels Hersh's departure from the alchemy of encaustics, in which process was content, to oils, in which the process of nature is content; from figuration to nature, and from studies inspired by biology to botany. Hersh's passion for nature was determined between the ages of two and eight. ("It was the best period of my childhood.") He lived in a Long Island development surrounded by forest, "from my memory, an endless forest. Even today I could still draw a map of every path and fork in the trails." In 1969, he made a pilgrimage from the urban density of southern California to the northern New Mexico countryside. This approchement with nature was vital to in his development as an artist. In New Mexico, he learned from the old people a respect and reverence for the land and the old ways. "I could never have gotten this from art school or by connecting to the art scene." But family lore of a Rumanian grandfather may be a central element in his artistic motivation: In 1905 at the age of fourteen, my Rumanian grandfather Herscovici was left on the streets of New York City by parents who had booked passage to America but, unable to afford the entry tariff for themselves, were forced to return home. Apprenticed two years earlier to an itinerant portrait painter in Rumania, Grandfather was enterprising, determined to survive in America and to become an artist. Eventually, he moved to Chicago, putting himself through the Chicago Art Institute with a grueling factory job. He married and became the paterfamilias, but the lack of finances provoked a breakdown. A doctor advised him to give up one of his occupations; his sense of familial duty dictated that he abandon art. So, one day, he piled up all his canvases and equipment and set fire to them. A short time after, at the age of forty-four, he died of a stroke. While a studio move to the country inspired the subject matter of this series, monotypes often lead Hersh's work and become a proving ground for the further exploration of ideas on canvas. They even suggested a recent series of intimate, traditional Japanese woodblock prints that relate to the botanical paintings. The layering of color in the monotype process as well as the use of transparent washes for the woodblock prints is particularly evident in the botanical canvases which have been primed, underpainted, scumbled and then repeatedly glazed. The glazing process contributes to their luminosity imbuing them with otherworldliness. The images which are most successful attain a presence not unlike 10th Century stained glass. There is a feeling of illumination, saturation, staining, dyeing, bleeding, suffusion of color; the brushwork is almost invisible. Timelessness is another component reflected in the ambiguous space in which many of these images float or are suspended. Hersh has never anchored his paintings with a horizon line, and the volumetric treatment of Clematis, Primrose, Cephalaria, Fennel and Loasaceae augment their ascent toward surreality. There is shading and modeling, as in grisaille, but the essential light source (the result of glazing) seems to come from inside the plant, from the plant's own energy. With Heath, for example, the pulsing flower buds are so infused with light, they illuminate their own micro universe. (One may recall the photographs by Walter Chappell who used the plant's own energy to develop the negative images.) A single red dot implodes the aloe green of Lime Mallow with a sense of the sacred; white dots infuse Fennel and Primrose with a mysterious ambent energy reminiscent of the giant seedlings in the 13th Century manuscript, Carmina Burana. As any complex subject might, these botanical images have footnotes-architectural references, references to manmade structures, surprising overlays of color which suggest the discontinuities and vulnerability of the artist as man. The partial grid obscuring Highbush is one example: the overlay of alizarin crimson upon the sulphured fruit pods, the white handle that mirrors its black stem. The metallic adornment of the stout Pumpkin Tendril is another, while the abstracted grid of color that mirrors Lime Mallow also refutes it. Is the return to the harmony of botanical forms a refuge from the noise, frenzy and disharmony of contemporary life? These images have, after all, risen phoenix-like from the bonfire of Grandfather Herscovici's dreams. Their strength may be that they imply not only microcosm but macrocosm; that in their glowing, floating jettison into artistic space, they become transcendent,iconic transfigurations of nature itself. M. Terence McKay Santa Fe, New Mexico August, 1995