Bruce Herman: A Profile

Patricia Hanlon

BEGINNINGS are difficult. Writers face the terror of the blank page; painters must face the analogous fear of the blank canvas—that expanse of pure potentiality that can be, as Bruce Herman puts it, "as terrifying as the Void itself."

Herman, like many artists, finds that ritual often provides a jump-start. He begins by putting on his work apron, so stiff with caked paint that it could stand on its own. Then he busies himself with other small chores in the studio, scraping down his palette from the previous day's work, smoothing his brushes—almost, he says, "as if in a dance around the central problem: how to begin. And the beginning is always the same. Either I choose an already existing painting to 'destroy'—that is, paint over—or I have to somehow activate the sterile white of a new canvas by covering it with a field of dark color."

He especially enjoys covering over old paintings. Traces of the discarded images show through the new brush-strokes: "It's like some bit of another story, or a line from a poem, or the foundation of an old house that one stumbles upon in the woods. Somehow these remnants engage my imagination and break the spell of inertia."

If, on the other hand, he begins with a new canvas, the dark wash he applies provides a point of departure. Rag in hand, he begins wiping at the dark field, subtracting from it until an image—sometimes an abstract shape, but more often, these days, a human figure—begins to emerge.

Once begun, the rest of the ritual consists of a gradual entry into what he calls the "bracketed time of the painting itself." He will turn the canvas sideways and upside-down, adding to and subtracting from the image, which seems to have an existence of its own. "It's like what Michelangelo said about the pieces of stone he had to quarry himself because of the particular figure ‘trapped in the stone.' I think many artists have this impression at times, if they allow themselves to."

Herman's is a view of artistic process informed not only by Michelangelo, but by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that imagination is "no free play of the soul, but a real meeting with real elements of being that are outside of us." Herman surely aims to communicate a sense of this "real meeting" to viewers of his paintings. "I want them to let down their guard," he says, "to have to deal with the reality of the image, to become vulnerable to it, to lose control of their defenses"

The Flogging, a large pastel from his recent series of "Via Dolorosa" paintings, confronts the viewer with a bent-over, kneeling Christ, with most of the face and all of the left leg in shadow. The flesh is grittily rendered with gray and red brushstrokes and rubbings-out. A cyclone of black lines behind the back suggests the crack and cut of a whip, with wounds of red and purple at the shoulders. But one is drawn especially to the oversized hands and forearms, which loom forward, approaching the lower right-hand edge of the picture.

Another work in this series, Falling Angels, puts the viewer in media res. A tangle of splay-limbed figures, features blurred and hair flying, hurtle quite literally "out of a clear blue sky," whooshing past the viewer in all directions, off all four edges of the canvas.

"The picture-plane can be a kind of bulletproof shield between people and the image," Herman comments. "I want my images always to be threatening that barrier. To be perfectly blunt about it, what I aim to do is help people encounter the transcendent." He adds, emphatically, that the viewer is not just a passive recipient, referring to Buber's notion that a responsive viewer can be the medium through which the image "comes to life again." As Herman explains it, it's as if the painting "just sits there waiting for the 'good viewer' to come along. It's dormant until the responsive person is drawn into relation with the image."

Clearly, there is little of the urbane and ironic in Herman's approach to his work. Those who know him even slightly are struck by an earnest intensity—a "happy intensity," as one colleague put it—which tends to leapfrog past small talk straight into the realm of the significant.

A notation in his well-worn copy of George Steiner's Real Presences is revealing. Steiner writes that the "embarrassment we feel in bearing witness to the poetic, to the entrance into our lives of the mystery of otherness in art and in music, is of a metaphysical-religious kind.... Yet the attempt at testimony must be made and the ridicule incurred." Herman's response is scrawled diagonally across the bottom margin of the page: "Yes—we must risk the loss of 'face' in order to face the music—to encounter the authentic presence mediated by the art form. Otherwise we incur a more serious risk—meaninglessness and isolation."

It is an exhortation that he has taken to heart throughout his life.

Herman was born in 1953 to parents who, he says, "always loved me unconditionally. I have never doubted that." He spent his first eight years in Richmond, Virginia. Recurring childhood illnesses gave him ample time alone to look at things and to think about them. One particularly Wordsworthian "spot of time" occurred when he was six years old. He recalls seeing morning sunlight coming through the living-room window and glittering dust particles that swirled in the plank of light. It was, he says, "solid light and liquid light" at the same time. And more: the particles were like worlds, planets and galaxies "swimming around in God's light; God was that big and that wonderful." Thus his first intimations of God were visual. He knew, from this time on, that he would be an artist.

Another early inspiration was feature-length Disney animation: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (a segment of Fantasia). The fluid beauty of the animation appealed to him, as did what George Macdonald has called the "scent of unseen roses," the hints and adumbrations of "the country we were made for, where dreams really do come true."

Most of his childhood drawing was inspired by the natural world. He recalls being fascinated by cloud formations, trees reflected in water, the texture of moss on rock. A minutely rendered pen-and-ink drawing of a dandelion drew praise from a junior-high art teacher.

The tranquillity of Herman's childhood and early adolescence ended in the mid-1960s, however, after his family moved to Buffalo, New York. His father was frequently away on business trips, and his mother's alcoholism, previously hidden, became obvious and acute. Herman alludes to the dread of opening the front door after school each day. There were increasingly frequent trips to the local burger place for supper, his younger brothers in tow, money from his mother's purse in hand. In a short period of time, his secure childhood was upended. "When a comfortable world is damaged or destroyed, we suddenly glimpse how arbitrary and artificial, how falsely secure and unreal our world has been," Herman says.

At about the same time, Bruce attended confirmation classes at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. The fourteen-year-old frequently derailed the class with questions about suffering and the meaning of human existence. "My fellow catechumens were probably bored silly," Herman recalls. "But I had to know. Didn't everybody?... I don't think they warned Father Bernie about my type in seminary."

Shortly after his confirmation, he was alone in his room reading the Beatitudes in the gospel of Matthew. The room became charged with an unearthly radiance, an "ocean of light." It was not his first such visionary experience, nor his last. In fact, he assumed—until he described the event to a bemused Father Bernie—that this was a normal Christian experience.

Had the family stayed in Buffalo a few years longer, Herman's life might have followed a more straightforward path. But another corporate transfer took the family away to Atlanta—alien territory for a teenager with long hair and a northern accent. He soon met others who did not fit the conservative norms of his school, seekers and thinkers who were reading Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell, and Island, along with the books of Alan Watts, a popularizer of Eastern mysticism.

As might be surmised, the group was also experimenting with psychoactive drugs. Through his reading of the Hindu mystics, however, Herman discovered that drug-induced visions were considered a mirage by adepts on the spiritual path. Genuine mystical knowledge, on the other hand, could be attained by meditation, self-denial, and allegiance to a spiritual master.

In 1970 he met some disciples of Meher Baba, a well-known holy man from India who had died the previous year. His attraction to Baba's teachings was immediate and strong. There appeared to be no conflict with Herman's nascent Christian beliefs: Baba's disciples are not required to abandon their previous faith; on the contrary, they are encouraged to practice the precepts of that faith while building a strong bond of love with Meher Baba as guide and master. The earnest practice of the presence of Baba (considered by his disciples to be an avatar, or incarnation of God) bound the group together powerfully. "I no longer felt like a misfit with strange ideas," Herman says. The questions that Father Bernie had not been able to fully answer were answered by Baba: all events were meaningful and fit into an ultimate totality; nothing was random.

Furthermore, familial ties, in Baba's cosmology, were relatively insignificant: "Baba taught that reincarnation supplies us with a spiritual family, one that teaches us spiritual lessons. Under Baba's influence I came to believe that my biological family was not my real one—presumably the Baba community was. A wider world opened before me, and Baba held the map to this new life."

At seventeen, after working awhile as a leathersmith for a hippie boutique called "Atlantis Rising," Herman left home for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to be near the Meher Baba Retreat Center. Aside from the appeal of Baba's teachings, Herman was drawn by the seriousness with which many of the devotees pursued art: "I hadn't known any Christians who were like that—churchgoers seemed to be plodding types who paid their bills and went to bed on time."

At the Retreat Center he met Lynnfield and Phyllis Ott, an artist couple who had left promising New York art careers in order to live at the Meher Center. Lyn Ott had studied under Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Willem de Kooning, both prominent abstract expressionists. Ott's work paid tribute to the unfettered bravado of "action painting," in which the pure act of painting—without narrative or any reference to nature—is of primary importance. But at the same time, he was also indebted to the figurative tradition, and to Rembrandt especially. Ott's work represented a bold synthesis of seeming opposites, a synthesis that Herman found compelling. He was particularly drawn to Ott's portraits of Baba, in which the spiritual leader was rendered in a loose, painterly realism, but the backgrounds recalled the bold abstractions of action painting.

Herman was doing some simple landscape painting at the time, but he soon began painting his own Baba portraits. One of these depicts the master in a linen suit, swashbuckling mustache, and straw hat, surrounded by European followers. "It was a romanticized image of him, but consistent with what I knew of his character—he had liked to dress up in costumes and assume different personas, traveling through Europe and America incognito."

Herman served as Lyn Ott's apprentice for two years. Ott affectionately called him a "wild horse," and, in 1972, challenged him to go to art school. 'See if you can survive!"; he said.

An array of odd jobs and short-term digs followed. Herman found work as a tree-surgeon's assistant, fish packer, furniture sander, and X-ray developer. He moved from Myrtle Beach to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Boston, and then back to Gloucester. Midway through this period, he made a pilgrimage to Ahmadnagar, India to pay homage at Baba's tomb, a journey that all serious disciples of Baba eventually make.

In November of 1973, he married Meg Matthews, an art student herself, but one with little inclination toward mysticism, and even less toward Indian holy men. "Aside from attending Anglican day schools, and thus having the liturgy and the hymns drummed into her, she'd read all C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as a child," Herman comments. "That in particular must have inoculated her. She knew instinctively that Baba wasn't Aslan," the lion Christ-figure of Narnia.

It wasn't until 1974 that Herman was finally able to enroll at Boston University's School for the Arts. His first child, Ben, was born while he was in his first painting class. Finances were tight: the young family continued to move frequently within the Boston area, bartering carpentry and house-painting in exchange for rent.

As an undergraduate at BU, Herman studied with David Aronson and Reed Kay. In contrast to the abstractionist-dominated curricula of most major art schools of the day, BU provided a rigorous classical education. Undergraduate students spent a great deal of time drawing the human figure, and they also learned old-master techniques of mixing and grinding oil paint, stretching and priming canvas, preparing gesso made from rabbit-skin glue and chalk, and painting with techniques such as encaustic and egg tempera. For a visionary like Herman, the technical rigor proved a bit difficult to adjust to at first. "I felt like the apprentice in Fantasia," Herman admits. "It seemed there existed this magical art in a forbidden book that only the wizard knew. The apprentice wanted to learn, yet first he had to do the sweeping and mopping and cleaning up."

But the school's emphasis on craft and careful observation served Herman well. He began MFA work there in 1977 with a teaching fellowship, studying under James Weeks and Philip Guston, a friend and colleague of Jackson Pollock. Most of the graduate faculty avoided any kind of "creativity training" with their students, focusing, as did the undergraduate faculty, on teachable skills: the rendering of form, space, color, and light. The professors rarely talked about their own work, and did not particularly seek to pass on their styles to young disciples. Guston, however—perhaps because of his considerable stature in the art world—tended to attract acolytes, but Herman was determined not to become one of them.

If he had a master of any sort during this period, it was the German expressionist Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Counter to the abstractionist tenet of preserving the formal purity of the two-dimensional canvas, Beckmann's work is unabashedly illusionistic and figurative. Moreover, Beckmann explicitly aims to communicate truth about human existence, the reality which exists apart from the confines of the picture-plane. Speaking from the spiritual wreckage of the post-World War I era, Beckmann once said that "the sole justification for our existence as artists, superfluous and egoistic though we are, is to confront people with the image of their destiny." Herman found Beckmann's declarations resonant with his own pilgrimage; his second-year grad-school paintings are Beckmannesque in their densely-packed spaces, scattered archetypal symbols, and distorted, interlocking figures.

Caiaphas and the Hypocrites, painted in 1979, focuses on a loincloth-clad, triple-faced Christ sprawled supine on the floor of what appears to be an artist's loft. His right hand (with nailprint) rests on a skull. A robed man crouching beneath a small stepladder grasps Christ's heel. A figure with oversized hands clasped around the neck of a fiddle sinks it, like a sword, into Christ's side. The expression on the bluish face of the fiddler, which is placed dead center and stares straight at the viewer, is pure angst. Despite the grim subject matter, the painting has a cloisonné effect: the figures and objects are outlined in black, and the resulting lines form a complex, almost jewel-like pattern.

This painting, along with a precursor, The Muse, gained him a graduate-exhibition prize: a year's study and travel in France and Italy, the traditional pilgrimage of serious art students at the culmination of their training.

It should have been a glorious time. With his wife and two small children (a daughter, Sarah, was born in 1979), he rented a stone farmhouse in Tuscany, just north of Florence. As well as spending time in the great art storehouses of Florence, he was able to travel to other important museums in Amsterdam, Bruges, Antwerp, Paris, London, Munich, and Rome. But he found himself oddly unmoved, and, at times, even bored, though he could barely admit this even to himself. He tried to paint, plein air, the fulgent vineyards that spread in all directions outside the farmhouse. But he was drawn instead to his windowless basement studio, with its single bulb dangling on a chain.

One day as he was drawing in this dungeon-like space, he was swept into a kind of fugue state. He had little conscious control over what his hands were doing; it felt like the visual equivalent of automatic writing. When he was done he sank back, feeling shaky, and surveyed what he had put on the large sheet of paper: a man with luminous cat-eyes, riding on the back of a beast and holding a dagger to its neck, but with the blade also turned partially toward the viewer. The rest of the picture was crowded with olive groves, a Tuscan farmhouse, three closely-spaced cypress trees, and an oversized moon. The image evoked only horror for him, and, worse still, it seemed inescapably to have some connection to Meher Baba.

He came out into the daylight to get clear of the disturbing image, hoping to find Meg and the children and draw some comfort and sanity from their presence. But it was mid-day, and Meg had gone to pick up Ben at his kindergarten.

In fact, doubts about his spiritual master had plagued Herman long before this time. Some years before, a mentor at the Retreat Center had confided to him that Baba actually controlled world events. An intimate disciple, in fact, had heard Baba say that Hitler was a pawn in Baba's game—that, in Baba's alleged words, Hitler "did not die a coward, as some suppose. He died a hero, just like Judas."

Herman struggled with the moral distastefulness of such a statement. Had Baba the God-man actually authored evil? If so, how could anyone possibly worship him? And yet Baba had taught that truth lay beyond such "lower" categories as good and evil. Did Herman's doubts merely signal a spiritual immaturity that would gradually be purged as he became more enlightened? He could not know, and thus did not, that day in Tuscany, pursue this line of thinking to any resolution.

Upon returning to the United States in early 1980, he found a teaching job at Beaver Country Day School, a private prep school in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. This was a purely pragmatic career move, spurred by the need to support his family. Nevertheless, he discovered, to his surprise, a genuine vocation for teaching. During his three-year stint there, he also helped build a series of artists' studios in the old Bakers' Chocolate Mills in Dorchester. In exchange for this effort, he received a spacious, rent-free studio, where he was able to begin a series of large paintings, more of the expressionist figure compositions he had begun as a graduate student. All the while he was advancing in the Baba community. He was elected president of the Meher Baba Information Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and frequently traveled to the Retreat Center in South Carolina.

By the summer of 1982, however, whatever delicate mechanism had previously allowed him to balance the tension between faith and doubt simply began to self-destruct. More and more frequently, his paintings revealed what he terms, flatly, "the horror and dread at the core of my inner life."

Paintings from this period typically include large exaggerated figures that gesture in a theatrical way—like medieval mummers in a street sideshow, performing morality and mystery plays. Many of the figures wear masks, blindfolds or costumes, and, judging from their facial expressions, seem to be in trance or dream states. Various cryptic symbols appear in these paintings: alchemy equipment, ram's skulls (the "familiar spirit" of sorcerers), Freudian and Jungian archetypes, and also, frequently, the three cypress trees that had first appeared in the Tuscany drawing, and which had become for him a symbol of evil. "Somehow," Herman explains, "by following the expressionist dictum of total spontaneity I had been able to paint exactly what was going on in my spiritual life. These paintings revealed to me—as much as to any potential audience—the state of my soul. They functioned for me as a kind of coded message-in-a-bottle sent from my deeper self to show me how bound I was to spiritual forces."

Eventually, he responded to that message. The night after Christmas 1982, Herman renounced Meher Baba and "all the forces of wickedness in high places," recommitting his life to Christ. There were no "fireworks displays like the mystical states I had experienced while with Baba. I just knew that I was safe forever from the turmoil and dread that had nearly consumed me."

For a couple of years following his conversion, Herman painted images of Jesus' suffering, continuing in his usual expressionist mode. He showed some of this work at two galleries in Boston, Gallery NAGA and the Chapel Gallery, both, oddly enough, housed in former churches.

But this phase soon ended. He strongly felt the need to leave behind what he saw as the trappings of his "apostate former self." His involvement with mysticism had turned his attention inward, causing his art to focus on the labyrinths and runes of the psyche. The re-converted artist needed to get himself outdoors again, into the air and light of the natural world. He felt he had to commit himself to realism. He left Boston, leaving behind an art career that was just beginning to attract attention. Moving his family back up to Gloucester, he considered quitting painting altogether, but instead began producing loosely-rendered, non-symbolic landscapes and cityscapes. In 1984 he was hired at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, to begin developing an art program there.

His paintings from this period—from shortly after his conversion through the late 1980s—are nearly always saturated with warm and beneficent daylight. Subjects include Gloucester and waterfront and street scenes, and, a bit further away, Connecticut bridges and cornfields. Despite their pleasant subject matter, these paintings are never mannered or sentimental. Cox Reservation, a garden-and-grape-arbor scene painted in nearby Essex, is juicy and kinetic. Seen up close, it abstracts itself to splashy jabs and scrubbings of kelly green, peach, teal, lavender, swimming-pool aqua, and deep burgundy—colors that could have added up to just a pretty picture, but which, in fact, bristle and pulse with unexpected juxtapositions of tone and form.

Another landscape, Walker Creek, painted less than a mile from the artist's home, features a conical evergreen that seems a distant cousin to the cypress trees that had appeared so consistently in his earlier work. But whereas those trees, always appearing in triads, had been a stylized symbol of evil, this one is simply a tree, growing between a particular road and bit of salt marsh, its left side lit up a bright olive-green.

It was not until the winter of 1987-88 that he departed, tentatively at first, from straightforward realism. His paintings of city rooftops seem to have provided a link. Early Evening, for example, is, at first glance, a realist rendering of city buildings, their varied roofs at angles to each other. The palette is grayed, soft: charcoals, pinks, mauves, copper-patina greens. The hazy last light of day passes through a plume of smoke in the mid-background and comes to rest on a dormered mansard roof in the foreground. A longer look, though, reveals some slippage: the lower portion of the mansard-roof building is far more about paint than about architecture, and the edges of other buildings are similarly indeterminate.

In Visitation, a sepia-toned cityscape, this blurring of boundaries between reportage and the symbolic goes considerably further. Parts of it can be "read" rather quickly: in the foreground is a lit-up expanse of flat roof; in the background are a couple of arched buildings, reminiscent of post offices or public libraries. What lies in between is, as the title suggests, a diaphanous Presence—but one not quite separable from the "actual" elements of the scene: is that a wing, or just a waft of smoke? A luminous face, or a klieg light?

In 1991 Herman completed a series of large paintings that was exhibited at the Lincoln Gallery in Brookline under the title, Dream of Wet Pavements. Classically proportioned civic and factory buildings, many of them in ruins, sit in slick-surfaced floodwaters. The skies, contradicting the evidence of catastrophe, are frequently cerulean; some have postcard-pretty cloud formations. Arching elevated highways and bridges disappear into the viewer's space, or stop abruptly. Are they broken off? Never completed in the first place?

Herman traces the impetus for these paintings back to childhood, to Saturday morning visits to his father's office in the city: "At those times the streets were virtually empty, creating a feeling of melancholy. And there was the sublime and terrifying beauty of tall buildings—desolate, but magical."

Not surprisingly, the human figure is almost entirely absent from this body of work. Despite minor exceptions—a seated female figure in a detail of one of the cityscapes, for example—the paintings have little sense of human scale or presence, unless one counts the artifacts of human endeavor left behind in the deluge. At roughly the same time, however, Herman was producing a series of monoprints, some of which contain semi-abstract figures. Man and Machine, for example, as its title implies, pictures a male figure entrapped in machinery.

As early as 1987, various colleagues had encouraged Herman to consider a return to figurative work. Art critic David Tannous had told him then that his landscapes and cityscapes showed competence, but had less feeling and drama and commitment than his earlier expressionist images. Tannous, not himself a believer, spoke of the dearth of strong images of Christ in contemporary culture, encouraging Herman to enter the fray. Edward Knippers, who was exploring Biblical narrative almost exclusively in his own painting, seconded Tannous's opinion. So did some of Herman's students. "I was struck with the irony of the situation: I had tried to get back to something truer, purer, and more Christ-like by painting from nature, and yet members of the body of Christ were calling for what I did best: powerful expressionist images that are anything but decorative, peaceful, or (in the normal sense) uplifting—all things which I thought Christian art should be."

In 1991, he continued a series of expressionist figure compositions that he had begun during a semester's sabbatical. These evolved into the "Via Dolorosa" paintings, all focusing on the suffering and death of Christ. Herman felt that Protestantism tends largely to ignore Good Friday; most non-Episcopal Protestant churches do not even commemorate it, skipping straight from Maundy Thursday to Easter. The paintings were an attempt to address this problem of, in literary terms, the "unearned ending" that the resurrection has become in much of Protestant liturgy. From the beginning of the project he was inspired by the Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross. Herman's series is loosely based on the fourteen Stations, which include such extra-Biblical, traditional themes as the vision of St. Veronica and the stumbling of Christ on the way to Calvary.

From the outset, Herman had to wrestle with the obvious question: Is it possible in a postmodern era to paint Christ and his Passion both reverently and well? Clearly, anything hinting of portraiture was untenable—the moony, blond Jesuses of the early twentieth century are easy targets and spring immediately to mind, but so does a more recent, darker-complected image, which, hanging on innumerable Sunday-school walls, has the genial good looks of a Sears-catalog model.

An iconographic, two-dimensional universality would provide an obvious antidote: "Nobody mistakes a Byzantine icon for a portrait," Herman comments. "If you're trying to tell not just a story but a story of mythic proportions, you need to somehow convey the transcendent element, and straight naturalist rendering won't do it. You get too focused on the fly on the nose."

The outlined, cloisonné effect of his earlier figurative work, in fact, provided just the "bracketing" of reality that he sought. That is to say, outlined two-dimensional figures appear to be one step removed from the concrete and the everyday—an effect that, Herman says, "releases you from the responsibilities of reportage. You can get on with the business at hand." It is a similar tactic, it would seem, to the prefatory "once upon a time" of fairy tales, and a tactic employed by such painters as Georges Rouault (another significant influence on Herman's early career), whose heavy black outlines are reminiscent of the tracery of stained-glass windows.

Herman's Night comes closest among this series to the purely iconographic. Christ's wounds are stylized strokes of red-orange pastel that appear almost to float above the somber dark figure and black background. A lighter purple frames the outstretched arms and torso. Christ's facial features and musculature are sketched in delicately, hesitantly. A light patch at the groin could be read as genitalia or as cloth.

Most of the figures in the "Via Dolorosa" paintings are anything but two-dimensional, however. The Christ in the detail of Isaiah 53 [see Plate 3] is caught at an odd moment at the Place of the Skull, just before his nailing to the cross. He kneels, right arm extended and resting on a tree stump, left hand pressed to his chest, possibly staunching a wound. The shoulders and upper arms, lit from behind by the noon sun, are burly and solid, the hands apparently familiar with hammer, chisel, and plane. The lit-up portions of the face—the pale paint smudges defining the contours of the flesh around the mouth—speak strongly of the particular. And yet there are still traces of the earlier bracketing: the limbs are subtly edged with black, and, in the one spot—Christ's head and right shoulder—where this is not the case, Herman has allowed the technicolor blue of the background to press against the figure, stippling the crown of thorns, and framing the shoulder in a kind of parenthesis.

Herman's Simon of Cyrene likewise exhibits this tension between the particular and the iconographic. The musculature of the back and thighs, boldly drawn, strains palpably as Simon hoists the cross for the exhausted, fallen Christ. But the solidity and coiled energy of the figure owes as much to what Herman has done with the "interior" of the outlined figure: his layering of pastel scribbles and filmy, membrane-like washes—a parti-colored and frenetic effect that manages to look like pigment and flesh at the same time.

The Crowning has a similar effect, even though the palette of this painting is far more somber than that of Simon. One senses, for example, that the brier running diagonally across Christ's face is sharp and that it hurts, but one is also aware of that brier as a narrow, wiped-away streak, reminiscent of finger-painting.

"I do love paint itself," Herman admits. "The paintings are about the Passion and the physicality of the Passion, but they're also about color and texture and the juiciness of paint. They aren't all process, but I don't make any attempt to conceal the process, either. The scrubbing out and the tentativeness—I leave a lot of that behind on the canvas."

A colleague went out of his way to praise the "reticence" of the images. On the face of it, "reticent" is not the first word that comes to mind in describing any of Herman's work. But the comment makes an odd sense, after all: Herman's "uncovered tracks" make plain the obvious truth that this is a human artifact, not the thing itself. Whereas a Matthias Grünewald crucifixion scene strives to render as minutely and horrifically as possible every gouge, scab and embedded thorn, Herman's brushwork leaves room for the imagination.

Descent, for example, putatively shows Christ being lowered from the cross after his death, head thrust back and neck distended, thick rope coiled around both wrists. The left hand is mitt-like and swollen, the nailprint partially obscured by shadow. Scrubbed-in staccato patches of color with a crisp overlay of rust-colored strokes suggest his wounds but draw back from specifying them. The background remains indeterminate, a swabbing of grays and whites that, again, presses at the edges of the figure rather than lying flat and illusionistic behind it. Without a Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus in the background, dealing with the obvious physics of removing a limp body from a high structure, the viewer is free to imagine, as well, a less literal "descent." Is this the descent of Christ into hell to preach to the spirits imprisoned there? Perhaps. But a white burst to the right of the head almost inescapably suggests ecstasy, as does the positioning of the head and open mouth. The painting thus points toward a consummation to which Christ's last words, "It is finished," allude.

It is this indeterminacy that allows us to look at another painting, Temptation [see page 42], without wondering when on the way to Calvary the scene is supposed to have happened. Here Christ hunches beneath the weight of the cross, his body small in comparison with his head and hands. His left shoulder twists forward at an impossible or, at least, joint-dislocating angle. A thick serpent, wrapped around the cross and held in Christ's hands, seems as exhausted as Christ, its eye shut in an almost cartoonish-looking slit. Christ's eyes are dark sockets, but he appears to gaze directly at the viewer.

It is certainly possible to speculate on what the serpent means here. Is Christ still wrestling with the temptation of Gethsemane? Or has he triumphed over that temptation, since the serpent appears to be dead or nearly so? Yet one senses, looking longer and closer, that this kind of speculation may miss the point. For there are surprises: although the serpent's head lies against Christ's thigh, it has something of the look of a sleeping child—even its mouth seems to be upturned in a slight smile. Furthermore, Christ's hand does not clench the serpent's body, but rests lightly against it. In short, we see exhaustion, resignation and sorrow, but an odd tenderness as well.

Herman has painted a mystery here, a kind of back-door view, perhaps, of the great kenosis or self-emptying of God the Son. And in this sense, the "Via Dolorosa" paintings can function as modern-day icons—as doors and windows to—as Buber put it—a "real meeting with real elements of being that are outside us."

Bruce Herman's pilgrimage has brought him from gnosticism—which seeks to rise above the tensions and contradictions of existence—into what Buber has called the "holy insecurity" of relationship with God, which, by contrast, dives headlong into those contradictions.

Not the least of these contradictions is Herman's place in the contemporary art world. Though there is a new interest in the possibilities of narrative in visual art, there's also a suspicion of specificity. A recent letter from a museum director who had seen the"Via Dolorosa" paintings is telling: the director admired the formal qualities of the paintings, their brushwork and "gutsy expressionism," but he also said he found it hard to believe that anyone besides Sunday-school didacts would attempt "meant" religious imagery. The unspoken implication, of course, is that an ironic use of religious iconography is intellectually defensible, but that sincerely intended religious painting is not.

Herman took the director's comments as back-handed praise, concluding that there is too much at stake in this life not to mean what you are saying. He sees the late twentieth century as a transitional time, a "time between times, wherein those who stand in a particular tradition may meet with a great deal of resistance; hence the call for 'silence, cunning, and exile.' But I've never been particularly silent or cunning—though I may be an exile. I blunder like a bull in the china shop of recent art history, ignoring the taboos and continuing to paint what seems in the secular world to be the new forbidden fruit: 'meant' Christian imagery."

Patricia Hanlon's fiction has been published in literary journals and collections including Spectrum and the Northcote Anthology. She also authored a chapter in the book Seeing for Ourselves: Writing Teachers as Researchers.

Visit Bruce Herman as Image Artist of the Month for November 2000

Issue #7 • Fall 1994