Unseen Realms
I’ve been a professional artist for more than a half-century. Back in the 1970s, when I was in my 20s, I imagined that after painting for fifty years I’d have some sense of mastery and perhaps modest critical approval or financial reward. I’ve had a measure of these things, but I have never really sought “fame and name”–or even financial success as a painter. I took a day job so that I could feed and shelter my family and avoid the pressures of the commercial gallery scene, which was never a world that my wife and I were drawn to. The truth is, I’m more motivated by the discovery process, by unveiling things in the act of painting… opening up invisible realities.
Death Be Not Proud , © Bruce Herman, 2025. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 86 × 144 in.
Death Be Not Proud (center panel detail), © Bruce Herman, 2025
Masquerade, © Bruce Herman, 2025. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 60 × 144 in.
Masquerade (right panel detail), © Bruce Herman, 2025
I believe that behind what’s happening in our country (and the world) right now is something very ancient and deeply malevolent–but I don’t think it is human in origin. I’m not discounting the very real human evils afoot. But my new paintings are maybe a kind of behind-the-veil danse macabre–not in the Disney sense or even of serious theatrical tradition, but something spiritually wicked happening just below the surface of human life.
Something Wicked This Way Comes, © Bruce Herman, 2025. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 86 × 150 in.
Something Wicked This Way Comes (right panel detail), © Bruce Herman, 2025
Child , © Bruce Herman, 2025. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 60 × 160 in.
This new body of work may be a kind of memento mori–a meditation on good, evil, and our frailty and mortality… a kind of painterly theater of the absurd. I hope the work connects with people who want to think about what’s really happening around and inside us in this hour. Though there’s a superficial political element in the new work (flags and hoods), I would hate to think people narrowly interpreted them as commentary. I don’t think these paintings have a clear-cut message. If anything, there is bewilderment more than confident assertion or persuasion.
Battling Unseen Realms, © Bruce Herman, 2025. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 60 x 140 in.
Battling Unseen Realms (center panel detail), © Bruce Herman, 2025
Stations, © Bruce Herman, 2026. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 60 x 140 in.
I think Wendell Berry’s poem “Our Real Work” captures the heart of what I feel here:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Sojourners, © Bruce Herman, 2026. Oil on wood panels, triptych, 60 x 140 in.
Sojourners center panel detail, © Bruce Herman, 2026
Covered, © 2026 Bruce Herman. Oil on wood, 60 × 40 in.
Conference, © 2026 Bruce Herman. Oil on wood, 60 × 40 in.
Come O Winds: Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, © 2026 Bruce Herman. Oil on wood, 60 × 40 in.
Commissioned by Gregory Laughlin and The Museum of the Bible
Come O Winds: Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones (detail), © Bruce Herman, 2026
The paintings came from somewhere deep inside of me and were a surprise to me–a break from what I’ve been doing for decades. They’re a kind of return to where I started in the 1970s. A familiar place that has become unfamiliar.
— Bruce Herman
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