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Prospero’s Tempest ©Bruce Herman, 2009;
oil on wood with gold and silver leaf 60” x 72” courtesy of the artist

For twenty nine of the past thirty years I’ve been making narrative, figurative art – “realistic” in the sense of utilizing recognizable subject matter and images of the human form in what has often been allusive of sacred story. The current work follows close on the heels of a large commission for a 13thC. Benedictine chapel in Orvieto, Italy -- two large triptychs on the life of the Virgin Mary. But the new paintings are entirely abstract – with the sole exception of one solitary human figure who stands as a kind of witness to the absence of any other recognizable depicted thing in an abstracted, distilled landscape – comprised of more than thirty paintings strung together like a long horizon-less expanse.

I live on Cape Ann, a peninsula north of Boston, where the land has been scoured by the retreat of the great Laurentide glaciers over twenty thousand years ago, leaving behind a deposit of granite boulders and palisades along the seacoast. Since first visiting the cape, I’ve felt a tug on my imagination by the raw beauty of the land, the sea and sky, and the ever-changing weather here. A tidal estuary at the end of our street, Walker Creek, marks time with its tides as it laps against the granite (which itself marks a different time – geologic time).

T.S. Eliot (in The Four Quartets) says:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Little Gidding ©Bruce Herman, 2009;
oil on wood 60” x 72” courtesy of the artist

After more than thirty-five years here, there is still a tidal pull for me on Cape Ann; a stability in the midst of constant change. The ancient rocks and slow-growing lichens; the reliable coming and going of seasons and sea have set in motion something in me, even as I’ve stayed in place.

I’ve tried and failed countless times to capture this place in straightforward landscape painting, but like Eliot, I’ve discovered that I am not here to simply record or verify or instruct. I am here to pray, to witness. And I’ve tried to bear witness to something impossible to articulate – even for a great poet, much less a painter. It’s that presence which marks our lives and our land, and also a feel of great absence – eons and all living things passing, yet the persistent hope that comes from this underlying permanence, this solid truth: the beauty of this place has its origin in a living God.

Bruce Herman’s art is deeply rooted in an understanding of theology, philosophy and aesthetics – but it is also strongly physical. He investigates complex layers of texture, color, and form, in a vigorous additive and subtractive process, actually employing an electric sander and scraper on his work. This process allows the artist a remarkable intimacy with his materials, with a rich surface texture resulting from the forces at play. These surfaces not only convey his personal vision of Presence/Absence, but also point toward the sublime in both abstract and recognizable pictorial elements; what Donald Kuspit would call, “an aesthetic clinging to organic life.” As such, this body of work in situ is an invitation to reflect on the tension between real presence and real absence. To live in this tension, this uncertainty, takes faith.

Barbara Brown Taylor likens it to trees, which sow their seeds deep in the soil, growing a long time in the dark—absent to sight—before the green sliver of life presents itself on the surface of the forest floor. “What has been lost,” she writes, “gradually becomes less important than what is to be found.” In a similar way, Herman’s work alters the viewer’s awareness of nature and creation-care situated in the gallery as an orchestrated hortus conclusus—a garden sanctuary – where the viewer is safe but invited to contemplate the fearsome immensity and sublimity of creation.

detail from Witness (Adamah)
©Bruce Herman, 2009
oil on wood 60” x 72”
courtesy of the artist

Now that Presence/Absence (the touring show of my current paintings) is up and running, and having seen it now at four separate exhibition venues, I feel that I can begin to reflect a little on where this work may have originated and where it might be leading. First off, I think it comes from a hunger to connect more deeply with nature, with the woods and seashore and tidal marshes here in Gloucester where I live. It also comes, I think, from a need to play – in the deepest sense of that word. Ask any child if their play is serious.

When I was about six or seven years old I had a particular epiphany about nature that may have bearing on this most recent work. I remember vividly a cold winter morning in Richmond, Virginia when the temperature outside dropped to an uncharacteristic freezing point and the windows of my family’s little brick house were covered with frost patterns. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like this. I was mesmerized by the shapes in the frost – which looked alternately like human cities being built and destroyed and then like sheaves of wheat or ferns and other vegetation. It looked like clouds and seascapes – like forests and castles and mountain ranges. I was mesmerized. Somehow the ice forming on the windowpane mirrored much larger patterns in nature and even of human history. A psychologist could easily explain the “projection” of my child’s imagination on the frost shapes – but to this day I believe that in that reverie I had a genuine insight into reality: from the cosmic to the subatomic there is an economy of form that is beautiful, deeply harmonized, and partaking of a larger pattern that expresses itself at both micro and macro levels. In a word, form is pattern, and pattern is design -- which is at the heart of all things.

My current paintings entitled collectively Presence/Absence, are consciously drawn as much from the patterns studied in geology as those in philosophy or theology– from nature as well as human culture. Beyond the patterns and form of nature, a human influence on this new body of work is the poetry of T. S. Eliot -- specifically The Four Quartets – a masterpiece with an almost inexhaustible allusiveness to it. I have carried Eliot’s poem with me for years – sometimes putting it away for years at a time, only to take it out again and dip into its depths of distilled memory, hope, and yes – love:

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

Cf. Little Gidding, section 4 of The Four Quartets

As I have read this poem over the years, my own aging process has made it progressively more accessible. The subject of the poem is both the passing of time and tide and the distillation in memory of those parts of our lives that point forward to an eschatological reality – the ultimate wellbeing that can only come when all pretence of permanence is shed and we embrace our end as a beginning.

The beauty that Four Quartets expresses is mixed with melancholy and the wreckage of a man’s life while at the same time singing of eternal harmonies and the deepest longing – our desire for divine love. Eliot’s vision is far from simple in the usual sense. His view of time, of the land and sea and sky (inspired by his many summers here on Cape Ann) is shot through with the fragmentation and potential meaninglessness of death evidenced in the “heap of broken images” and the flotsam and jetsam he describes at shore’s edge – as a metaphor for our shipwrecked lives. Yet despite these images of decay throughout the poem, the prevailing voice is hopeful and the end of the poem points to life’s final resolution:

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Cf. Little Gidding, section 4 of The Four Quartets

Quoting the mystic Julian of Norwich, “all manner of thing shall be well” the poet has also shown the connection of his work with sacred tradition, to Christian mysticism, and to a vision of healing in amidst the ruins. The poet writes of the presences, the vestiges of human culture and yet simultaneous absences hinted at in the ancient cultural ruins brought on by nature’s seemingly blind and overwhelming forces. Current day tsunamis, the chthonic forces of volcanic irruption, and the yearly cycle of the seasons all could point to our smallness and insignificance – but in Four Quartets these same forces – the classic medieval elements of earth, air, fire, and water – these same forces are aligned for Eliot with the perfect divine will that “wove this shirt of flame” – the love that burns away everything that is not pure in us.

Having lived here on Cape Ann myself for nearly four decades, and watching the weather systems that swirl in off the ocean I have felt deeply my own smallness and weakness.

Earth & Heaven/ The Great Ledge ©Bruce Herman, 2009; oil on wood with gold leaf 23” x 30”