Frank Herrmann Lecture
I attended a lecture given by former professor of DAAP, Frank Herrmann. He was discussing a show at the Weston Art Gallery. His body of work consisted of a multitude of pieces, each consisting of three areas. There was a band on top of each and a larger rectangular pace on the lower part of the canvas these to sections seemed to mimic a landscape in the sense that there was a clear separation between the two, which acted as a horizon. The third section in each piece was a tear drop shaped “pool,” as Herrmann would describe it. On a small table in the front of the room, he had some notebooks containing small watercolor experiments. As he was describing the process that formed as he began to accumulate more work, he said that he started off with the small watercolors and then moved on to large canvases.
I was quite intrigued by Frank Herrmann as he didn’t have the pretentious attitude about the rules of the process as many other artists that I’ve seen. He even said that he didn’t have a real process other than “playing around” with different materials and seeing where it all went. His large pieces were all mixed media and for a particular grey-black pigment that he used in one of his large pieces, he said he gathered soot from his chimney in a bucket and made paint. I was refreshing to see an artist who didn’t have such strict standards for materials. Herrmann made it very clear that he didn’t start with any direction in mind. Of course having no end-goal means having no possibility of messing up. I know a lot of artists (myself included) who could benefit from this attitude.
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