These paintings are senses exploding, palpable sounds and sights I know and feel in my body. A burning bush - brightest on the top of the right side panel - the ochres and oranges blend a little, seems the colors must have still been wet when slapped on - a multidimensional Tropicana sun bomb orange crush so fresh you can smell it. The wear worn denim blue and blue violet strokes push the egg yolk yellow and pumpkin orange forward like a fire. And Joan vomits it up perfectly (imo) close to every time. The confidence of stroke, deft of brush, color choice, and composition, are honed from years of labor - an amalgamation of made choices, series of decisions, and the affinity or repulsion to those choices. The zooming fast slapdash brushstroke provoked Rob to say, “looks like she did the left side in an afternoon” which - she likely did. The tangerine goldenrod cacophony open mouth sings - like a loud clap! of two strong hands. Ran as fast and as close as I could to the canvases, hung high above what used to be the info desk area - now a foyer sort of space between the outdoor sculpture garden and the stairwell with the dusty helicopter. Spotted the optimism through layers of glass, double doors, and the MoMA entry check point on the approach to the entrance, heading east on 53rd. This interview was conducted by telephone on the morning of Sunday January 31st, 2021. Herman and I wonder together about the unifying potential of abstraction, visceral looking, and faith as aesthetic guide. Here, Herman and I discuss a new body of paintings, now on view at L’editions, titled, “Rituals of Resistance.” Most of what we unpack in what follows concerns intakes and outpourings of energy: how to intentionally nurture energy in our bodies how to draw power from even our most strained positions how to expel what is broken and keep what works. One wishes to put a towel over Herman’s painting and one’s own head so as to deeply inhale their healing vapors – surely inner crusts would break apart and circulatory flows would be restored. These paintings contain an indexical ship’s log of how they came to be, and they also reveal a kind of sacred respiration: air as loving fuel, elemental gasses to refill our tanks. Herman does not paint the body’s flesh (quite the opposite, her “mass” appears to be weightless), and yet the body is exceedingly evident in the movement and breath of her canvases. We often love that oil paint can express the lushness of human flesh – the sliding, oily feeling of our subjective body rearranged into an object, which makes it safer to consider. Herman’s paintings offer the same billowing clouds of energy in an array of shifting and scurrying hues befitting the complexity of the electric human brain. I recognized instantly in her a gift that I, too, possess on my best days: enthusiastic and wholehearted energetic support. Interview - by Blair Hansen for L’editions Gallery, launch of Rituals of ResistanceĬolleen Herman is here to help.
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