Howard Hersh
Instagram: @howardhersh
Website: https://www.howardhersh.com
Bio:
Howard Hersh is a third generation artist who has maintained a professional studio practice for 40 years. Hersh has worked in a variety of mediums; drawing, printmaking, installation, painting in encaustic, oil, and acrylic, and lately, woodwork that have transformed the paintings into wall sculpture.
With over 70 solo exhibitions and 250 group shows, his works are in museum collections across the country, including Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Texas, Tucson Museum of Art, Bernard Zuckerman Museum of Art, Atlanta, Ga, and others. During his early years in the studio, Hersh was very influenced by Asian aesthetics and printmaking practices, leading to many commissions in Japan, Indonesia, and China. Hersh began his career in Santa Fe in 1984, then relocated back to his native California in 1998. Currently living in San Francisco, he has had a studio at the Hunters Point Shipyard for nineteen years.
In 2024, Hersh will have a mid-career retrospective at Cal State Stanislaus.
Statement:
As a full-time studio artist for over 40 years, I think of my work in the context of an ongoing thread of creativity. Similar to diary entries, the one consistent element in my work is me. Through incremental changes in my thinking, my focus, and the mechanics of the craft itself, the work has evolved organically. I subscribe to the famous Chuck Close quote; "Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work".
One could say that the foundation of my practice is philosophical; that is, I believe oneness and the inter-connectivity of all things as my baseline. I have strived to portray this belief by using imagery that is commonly not associated with each other, like organic and geometric, to illustrate the connectivity.
For the last 10 or so years, my focus has shifted to the differences between painting and sculpture. After all, paintings are pictures of things, while sculptures are things. Yet, true to my core beliefs, I've endeavored to blend the two. In the beginning, I utilized exposed framework in the paintings to blur the distinctions. Lately, I've added illusionistic techniques to the physicality of the constructed works.
