Molly Herman: Covid Spring and Mother’s Day Flowers
By Michael Gormley
“Get excited about it. I don’t mean getting out and tearing your hair--but paint the thing that makes you all a-tremble with its beauty.”
Charles W. Hawthorne
‘Ah! Sun-flower (weary of time)’, oil on birch panel, 10 x 8 in., 2020
Spring
Seasons in the Northeast are finicky and contrary (as are her natives). Spring heads the procession, disrespectful of calendar dates and assumed weather patterns, its feral temperature extremes and gale winds are uninvited guests well into April. Taking this predictable unpredictability in stride, conventional gardening wisdom advises against extensive new plantings until early May. Reasonably assured that some devil of a late winter squall won’t flatten the new flower bed twenty minutes after its been planted, we dutifully trudge to the local farmers markets and tend to the yard, terrace and window boxes such that all are in full bloom come Mother’s Day. This abundant display, celebrating nature’s cyclic rebirth and fertility, coincides perfectly with our concept of motherhood. Anna Jarvis ought to be commended for having successfully plumbed (though perhaps unwittingly) the primal underpinnings of agrarian traditions and re-aligned those cultural roots with modern family life. Ironically her celebration arose during the Woodrow Wilson administration--as did the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
Becoming an Artist
Molly Herman, a widely exhibited and prolific artist, is best known for her large scale abstract paintings that weave intricate layers of color and space into sensual compositions that rival Hoffman’s illusions. At Equity Gallery in 2018, Herman exhibited a collection of these signature works in a two -person show with Elizabeth Gilfilen titled “Cadences”. She notes that, “My larger abstract works (as shown at Equity) had a motif akin to setting a stage, drawing back or closing a curtain or giving a glimpse of a window beyond. Incidentally, my mother is a painter and I’m sure that it was her paintings, influenced by her love of Rothko, that first gave me the idea of becoming an artist.”
“Hyacinth,” 12” x 9.5”, oil on birch, 2020
Herman’s arrival at abstraction was circuitous; as an undergraduate she focused on figurative painting and adds that, “I had a strong desire to explore abstraction; but I was unsure how to approach the abstract in a meaningful way.” After graduating Herman traveled through France and Spain for nearly a year, taking itinerant jobs along the way ( on migrant farms and archeological digs) to fund her stay. At first she sought out the large national museums that held the works she studied in school, but soon began gravitating to more contemporary venues. Herman recalls that “I began encountering the works of artists such as Lucio Pozzi, who I subsequently studied with, Per Kirkeby , Helio Ouitica and Fundació Antoni Tàpies. The exposure to contemporary European art, and its expression of place through material exploration, was a revelation. Coupled with my wanderings as a “foreigner”, my identity as an American artist came into high relief and the question of painting, and how it could be done now and back home, became urgent.”
Pandemic
Shortly after quarantine orders was announced, Herman was informed that her upcoming solo exhibition had been shelved until 2021. She had been working on a series of large canvases in her Greenpoint studio when she got the news and, unable to work, made her way back home. “I walked past a florist who was frantically closing up her shop” Herman recalls, “she thrust a bouquet toward me and said I needed them. I must have looked pitiful but I gladly accepted it.”
Within days Herman stopped painting altogether. “It didn’t help my darkening mood,” she winces, “…and I instinctually knew that if I didn’t figure out some way to get working again I’d lose my mind.” She’s not entirely sure what prompted the decision to place an online order for small panels but perhaps she reasoned that jump starting her painting on a modest scale wouldn’t seem as daunting. Alas that decision threw up another block. Herman explains, “the scale of my larger works syncs with the content and intent---they are field explorations of color, texture and space. They are layers upon layers, like breathtaking pastoral landscapes scumbled with pigments as rich and as dense as the dirt I scraped off the Gallo-Roman treasures found during that summer abroad years before.”
“Florine’s Bouquet’, oil on birch panel, 12 x 9.5 in., 2020
For Herman, art is continuous, she muses, “Even when I am not making something in the moment, I trust that am storing experiences and art will flow again when the moment is right.”
But what subject was right for this moment? Herman smiles, “I’m generally able to conjure my sensorial experiences and try to tap into their power to paint; but I was understandably distracted and anxious. I found it hard to focus but I desperately wanted to dive back into painting. And looking for a way to immerse myself I remembered the flowers in the bouquet – each as an individual. ‘Focus on one flower at a time’, I told myself, ‘Simply look and paint as you see it. Just for today – just look, then begin and finish this painting today’. That one painting grew (pardon the pun) out of this need to focus deeply, to pause and to try and let go of the bad news and remember the hope that spring brings”.
‘Bud’ oil on birch panel, 10 x 8 in., 2020
Herman’s new “Florals” series are breathtaking miniatures that evince a steadfast exploration of line and form that recalls both the whimsy of Redon and Cezanne’s architectural color breaks. “Bud”, pictured above, exemplifies Herman’s treatment of the motif as a means to display a colorist’s grasp of the luminous qualities of chroma--used here to express the shimmering translucency of a rose bud. In the treasured technique tome “Hawthorne On Painting”, the American painter and teacher Charles W. Hawthorne is often quoted as admonishing those students whose hubris set them to painting complicated spectacles and heroically overblown subjects. Hawthorne was certain that a true artistic spirit could find the extraordinary in simple things and urged his student to paint subjects that were close at hand and often overlooked. The more heroic challenge, he insisted, lie in the creation of noble paintings of chipped crockery and cast off dishpans. “Get excited about it” he would chide, “I don’t mean getting out and tearing your hair--but paint the thing that makes you all a-tremble with its beauty.” With ‘Bucket’ Herman takes on Hawthorne’s challenge and with a focused view on the commonplace, foregrounds the near monastic beauty of wild flowers dumped in a mop pan by expressing it boldly and truthfully---and thereby creates a painting that the whole world can rejoice in.
‘Bucket O’ Sunshine’, oil on birch panel, 12x 9.5 in., 2020
In elaborating further about what is unique to The Florals series, Herman notes, “…the paintings are deliberately intimate and meditative. Compositionally, the subject framing signals a devotional intent by centering the flower in relation to the edges --as if it were an icon. The Florals are also like portraits of the actor – close up and center stage. Though representational, my perspective as an abstract painter keeps me interested in the quality of the paint and often the Florals show brush marks and drips proudly. While working, opportunities for abstraction also present themselves in a texture or the ground around the central flower”
With our lives disrupted and turned upside down, displays of extravagance or elaborate artifice smack of incomprehensible decadence and demoralization. And yet, a reactionary steeling against the salubrious effects that beauty and abundance have on the soul cannot be a solution. Herman concludes that, “There is so much suffering – even as we struggle or manage individually to survive, collectively we are not OK. It was an alarm for me to take notice and try to take a break from all the news and screen time and take a moment every day to meditate. For me, painting the Florals has become another way to meditate, to contemplate the hope of the coming spring and hold on.”
Happy Mother’s Day; rest in the great round--and know that this to will pass and the world will renew and reinvent itself as assuredly as winter turns to spring.
‘Dahlia’, oil on birch panel, 12 x 9.5 in., 2020
We welcome you to visit our online project space and view the entirety of Herman’s new Florals series --- they are an exclusive offering by Equity Gallery. Given our present circumstances, we trust you will concur that the uplifting and forthright spirit of these works, and their modest price point, makes them ideal for gift-giving and collecting.
To see more of Molly Herman’s current floral series — available on the NYAE site this Spring— visit the showroom here!