Finding the flow that is not me

• Artist-in-residence Daniel Herr tries to sidestep his own ego when painting

 

April 28, 2019

Courtesy of Daniel Herr

Daniel Herr, Northwestern's current artist-in-residence, sits at the interstice of two of the paintings he's been working on while here in Alva. His finished work will be exhibited May 3 at Greenhouse Gallery, 1407 College Blvd. The exhibit is free to the public, and ADA-accessible.

Daniel Herr, 36, Northwestern Oklahoma State University's current artist in residence, grew up in a creative household north of San Francisco, he said.

"My brother is a musician and my dad's a painter, and I spent a lot of time making stuff" as a kid, he said. "I started off on music, but I gravitated toward paint because it didn't seem like ... I was playing classical music, and I didn't want to be recreating someone else's art." He wanted to make the art himself.

As a student, he learned how to create realistic art – still life, nudes, and so forth. He got his formal education at the University of California at Davis, and then moved to New York City. He lived there four years, and then went to graduate school in Boston.

"I could draw a still life or landscape and have it just look really accurate," Herr said, "and that's what students do, that's what I did. You have to do that as a student.

"But then you have to make something that belongs to you, that reflects how you see things and how you see the world and how you communicate. When drawing something realistic – I never felt comfortable saying this was something I made, this still life of a cup. There was nothing I had to say about it; it was just sort of there."

He had to find his own voice. That was the next step. And then he discovered that meant removing his own ego from the process.

"As an artist you have to figure out how you communicate, like a writer finding their voice," Herr said. "It's taken me a while to figure it out."

An artist's voice can be a mysterious thing. For some, it's like a seed born with them – or maybe something older, like a gene. Given the right conditions, the seed sprouts or the gene emits a scent or a vibration that triggers a new way of seeing, a flash of insight or a life-changing revelation.

For some people, conditions don't matter; it's all in learning how to approach this part of you – Virginia Woolf called it a well, and said she had to descend into it even if it was dark, frightening and threatened to drown her.

And the language this inner voice uses can't be found in everyday conversation. It's wordless, multilayered; it may go forward and backward at the same time; around in circles, fold in on itself, and unfurl like an Elizabethan ruff.

And that's what the artist has to learn how to translate into a form that can be seen or heard or read by others.

But Herr refuses to take himself seriously.

"I paint like this because it's absurd, and the most absurd thing ... why would anybody care about paint being smeared around on a canvas by some guy? It doesn't matter!" he said.

"An artist is just a person. It's not about me telling you what I feel, it's about me accessing some sort of emotional thing or spiritual thing that's not readily apparent. The best paintings I've ever made are just ones that sort of painted themselves, and I don't even remember how I did it.

"It has to do with me taking my hand out of it. You have a really deliberate intention when you hold a brush and paint a line or a form. I want things to not" be so deliberate, but to dip into the subconscious of both artist and viewer.

Those "best" paintings are the result of what Herr calls a "flow."

"I like to find a mental flow, I guess. I mean, critical thinking is important, but when you're painting or making art it's not necessarily logical. It's more spiritual. It's taking the ego out."

Herr's Process

Herr has done a handful of residencies; mostly he's painting in his 200-square foot studio in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his fiancée, who is a writer. He works in their living space, so, Herr said, laughing, "she's forced to see what I'm working on."

She's the only regular witness of his process; he tries not to show unfinished artwork to other people. People are too prone to telling him a work is finished when he knows it's not.

And the road from initial spark to finished work of art is a journey of a thousand steps.

When Herr sees something – often a landscape – that contains forms that spark him artistically, he'll often take a picture of it with his phone. "I take a lot of pictures with my phone," he said, "and then make drawings from the pictures. But I don't want to make a direct rendering of what's going on."

Instead, he'll make a series of drawings, each drawing based on the previous drawing, and that "keeps removing the original image, in a way. And then I start the painting based on the drawing."

But that's not enough distance from the original.

"Another thing I've been doing just to change things up, I turn (the paintings) upside down and work on them; put them on the floor and work on them" and even walk on the paintings, or let the canvases fold as he takes them from the wall so that the wet paint transfers onto another part of the canvas. While at Northwestern, "I've been doing a drawing on a projector over a painting I've already started, and it's added an element of almost randomness to it. It's a sort of way to break up my thinking, so that it's not just a one-point perspective."

You Gotta Break Out of Your Bubble

But you can't let yourself get stuck in a rigid routine, Herr said.

"It is important to get out of your routine, to leave our bubble. If I'm painting in my studio for months and months on end, I'm losing focus and losing my sense of perspective. But if you travel, you have to start over, and that can be real helpful." Even the little things – like when he did a residency in Chile, he discovered "they don't have paper towels there," which meant he had to tear up his own shirts to use in their place, and to find ways to keep his brushes supple without cleaning them in his usual way.

Just being forced to change even these small routines "influenced the way I think," he said, and so did meeting artists in other places and watching how they work.

Here in Alva, the biggest changes to his routine had to do with space and time. "This is the biggest studio I've ever had!" he said of the studio the artist-in-residence program provides in the Jesse Dunn Annex on campus. He guesses it's about 600 square feet. "The studio is so large that I've been able to step back really far to see the work from a distance. My studio in New York is only a quarter of the size in that room."

Also, "being here, I've slowed down a lot, slowed down my thinking and lifestyle. I've had a lot of time to think about it (his painting). A lot of time to work on it."

And the environment is more peaceful, he said. "There's a lot of nature here, which is nice – waking up with the birds, walking over to the studio and working all day, spending time with friends."

Some aspects of this area could be extremely attractive to artists, merely from a practical viewpoint, Herr noted.

"It's a trip! There's a lot of potential. There's plenty of real estate here, for one thing. There's any number of empty store fronts that could be massive studios or museums, even, if somebody wanted to put the money into it."

Herr's Art To Be Exhibited Friday, May 3

Daniel Herr

Daniel Herr's not-yet-finished artwork is displayed in his Jesse Dunn Annex studio -- "The biggest studio I've ever had!" he said.

One bit of real estate currently up for sale – a greenhouse – will actually be used for Herr's exhibit this coming Friday. Dubbed "Greenhouse Gallery," it's only being used temporarily until the owner finds a buyer (Kyle Larson, art professor and director of NWOSU's artist-in-residence program, said it's "a good, raw space to exhibit art," and wished in passing that, by some miracle, it could become a place the university's art program could use regularly).

Free to the public, Herr's work will be on exhibit there at Greenhouse Gallery on Friday, May 3, from 5 to 8 p.m. Located at 1407 College Blvd., the building is ADA-accessible.

Larson wanted to thank owner Vanessa Pettit Brewer for the use of the space, which will also house Northwestern's Visual Arts Advanced Studio exhibition, "Chockablock," the following week. This exhibition, featuring work by visual arts minors Capri Gahr, Brieanna McClure, Ashley Fischer and Alanna Negelein, will have its opening reception on Thursday, May 9, from 5 to 8 p.m. This exhibition -- free and open to the public -- represents the culmination of a semester-long exploration of individual themes and methods.

 

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