The Body Broken
The subtext of everything I make is the frail and imperfect human body.
Even when I’m allowing the abstract formal elements (line, color, texture, shape etc.) to dominate, obscure, or damage the depicted human form, that form is always implicit somewhere in the painting—if only as a trace or gesture. Or it is somehow evident the act itself of making — my own body being the medium of those marks. We cannot escape ourselves—and our bodies are ourselves. It’s a trick of language that makes us think we are separate from our bodies. We speak of “my” body as though it is a possession like our automobile—more a means of transportation than our essential existence, our self. But this trick of language has theological implications that have bedeviled us for millennia and caused no end of confusion about this life and hopes for the next. Our body is who we are, and we are resurrected as a body—not a disembodied spirit.
Annunciation, ©Bruce Herman, 2002, oil on wood with silver leaf; 110" × 72" (private collection)
Elegy For Bonhoeffer, ©Bruce Herman, 2002, oil on canvas with gold leaf; 72" × 48" (collection of Messiah College)
My deepest hunches as a painter center upon this truth: the body is the site of meeting — meeting ourselves, meeting others, meeting God. And meeting (entering-into) relationship is at the heart of my faith and my art.
Elegy for St. Sebastian, ©Bruce Herman, 2004, oil on canvas with gold-leafed wood; 56" × 36"
But why foreground brokenness and not focus on healing and wholeness? That too is a central theme of my thought and my work. I believe that the entire cosmos is broken and needs healing. I love the Hasidic tradition which involves the idea that the universe is now suffering but since the Creator imbued everything created with sparks or shards of the Divine—the task of the Hasid (the faithful human) is to “raise the sparks”—to heal and restore the broken Creation. Religious life is an act of healing the brokenness of Creation. And as a painter, I want very much to see my work as part of that faithful attempt to act out of love and the desire for healing. The broken body becomes not only the site of meeting, but also the encounter with love and hope and healing.
Elegy for St. Catherine, ©Bruce Herman, 2004, oil on canvas with gold-leafed wood; 56" × 36"
Art has the potential for healing as we explicitly acknowledge the mortality and the weakness of our frame — along with the willingness to “lay down one’s life for friends”
With His Stripes, ©Bruce Herman, 1997, Encaustic on wood; 36" × 24"
The martyrs of the Church (both historic and contemporary) became the focus for me of this potential for an art of healing. Explicitly acknowledging the mortality and the weakness of our frame — along with the willingness to “lay down one’s life for friends” — because the very locus of all my studio efforts in the early years after fire destroyed our home and my studio and two decades worth of my work.
— Bruce Herman
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