A CONVERSATION WITH: Colleen Herman
with photography by Elevine Berge
Splishes, splashes, smudges - brushstrokes that seem alive, and vibrant colors poured onto an unstretched canvas or rubbed into paper. If you have laid eyes on an artwork created by Colleen Herman, you may have felt it in some or all chakras at once, as they can both pull you close and push you far into another realm.
Colleen is a painter, an elegant mover, a connector, a seeker, and a real shaker, who carries herself through the world with utmost curiosity - and also with an admirable posture, from years of both teaching and practicing Iyengar yoga.
We reconnected over this interview just as the temperatures started to dip into autumn.
Longview: We know you are currently submerged in pre-exhibition mode, working towards some exciting new showings and collaborations, how are you doing in the midst of it all?
Colleen: I am feeling incredibly grateful to be showing work that means a lot to me on two different occasions, and very lucky to work with people whom I admire and learn a great deal from. As an artist, studio practice can be very isolating and therefore challenging - especially to such a social extrovert like me - haha.
The first show opens Nov 3 in Los Angeles at Sarah Brook Gallery. The composer Megan Perry Fisher is dropping her forthcoming album, Pensées on November 3, the same day we are opening an exhibition of the paintings I made that correspond to her 12 compositions. A special celebration for each of us after years of work. This project provided opportunities to probe into process and collaboration, and so many insights while working closely with another artist whose process is similar to mine with wildly different outcomes. I’m proud of us!
There is also positive anticipation and a healthy dose of nerves building for my forthcoming solo with Olympia Gallery opening 12/12. This particular show has been percolating since April; upon formal initiation into Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic as Power. I say initiation because I’ve looked to her as a teacher and guide while making the work for this show. Listening to the audio recording of Lorde delivering this speech from 1978 - every day in studio for months. It’s changed me, and is changing me. Her omnipresence is interwoven into every fiber of these paintings, pushing me to dive into new dimensions. I’m indebted to Ali Rossi and Chantal Lee of Olympia for their support and encouragement.
L: Powerful! Big energies moving through you and out into the world.
Speaking of energies…for the last few years you have spent your time split between New York City’s East Village and a pastoral place tucked away in the trees in the Hudson Valley. How do you transition your body and mind between these two contrasting yet co-existing worlds of cracking asphalt and lush grasslands?
C:The first thing that comes to mind in terms of transition is, that any mode of transportation feels like crossing a threshold of sorts. Often I drive, and there’s a point on the Taconic [State Parkway] where the vista opens up and all of a sudden you’re in the mountains. - Everything settles down in a different way and it feels like taking a drive rather than getting from point A to point B. So that is a shift literally - it is so visual but it is also so visceral - in crossing that threshold. And similarly on the train. If I’m lucky enough to get a window seat, just being by the water and kind of fixating on the sunlight hitting the water. But it’s those mountainous moments for me really, when being in the valley, changing states, from city person to country person, sensing the view getting bigger and bigger, more expansive and giving me a broader scope of vision.
L: And how do you then transition back to the city?
C: I think coming from the country to the city, I try to incorporate any way I can to soften the blow of coming back from that softness I want to harness as much as possible. Like driving at “off” hours just to be nicer to myself. Or when taking the train, I keep an awareness that these places hold portals into other worlds and prepare myself for where I am going to be next, like mentally preparing for Penn station haha. It’s harder when coming from the country to the city. But maintaining some of that softness is the good challenge. Like taking along a piece of the country. - Often in the way of food, bringing something green from the farmers market, but sometimes in the winter I accidentally wear my “upstate jacket” down to the city, and that’s something nice too- an item holding a charge of being in the trees. I am trying to not think about the places as too separate. Like, okay I am this person here and this person there, but I am the same person.
L:Yes, so often it would be wonderful to just be able to just snap our fingers and be somewhere else, but these transitional periods of time during traveling states can actually be so necessary - to be able to prepare ourselves, using the in-between stages to transition.
C: Completely! Like really appreciating being on a plane for the very same reason. - That heightened experience that I can only be right here in this tin box transporting me to another world. It is a good meditative time to think about where you have been and where you are going. Letting the transitioning moment be an important ceremony. We are so lucky also, to have nature so close to New York City, two hours on the train and boom! What a gift.
Longview: Looking back in time a little, do you have an early memory of being in a garden or around plants?
Colleen: Growing up in Baltimore there was this wealthy man named Harvey Ladew, and he had an estate with a very beautiful home and extraordinary gardens full of topiaries. He traveled the world to see all these gardens that he had people recreate in his gardens. What stuck with me as a young person - my first exposure to something that felt worldly in a sense - it felt magical because it was taken care of. The land was considered and shaped consciously around the transitions, taking you from an English garden to a Japanese teahouse, or you would go down a path to a poet’s den, or through a portal to a space where an ensemble could play. That became a really special place to go with my dad, it became something we would do on “his weekend” with us. It felt so special to be in this place and we made a connection to it, revisiting and watching its growth. It was a mixture of experiencing preservation and seeing what that really can look like for land, but also how a person who had made something like that kept it open for the public, sharing his vision to enjoy this considered nature space.
L: Was your dad passionate about gardens then?
C: In a sense. After my parents divorced and we spent concentrated time with my dad, he had the challenge of figuring out how to spend time with these two little girls basically. Visiting the gardens happened to be something that we all genuinely loved. It felt special, like going abroad for a couple of hours. - It really took us out of our day-to-day. But maybe it did inspire him, because later in life him and his wife bought an old nursery that had fallen into disrepair, and the two of them rehabilitated all these special holly trees there. So maybe there was some inspiration from our weekend ritual of going to the garden and being somewhere that was so truly cared for.
Longview: How would you describe your relationship today with nature / the natural world?
C: When growing up, my mum lived in a valley with a reservoir nearby so I drove in the trees to go home, and my dad moved to the dilapidated nursery. So nature was around, but not anything like the Catskills mountains or the farm country of the Hudson Valley. Living in New York City for 16 years I never felt deprived of nature either. - I think Central Park is amazing, knowing it like the back of my hand from living on the Upper East Side. I always feel surrounded by nature although it’s one of the biggest cities in the world.
But it really does feel like having an escape upstate has enriched my day-to-day experience and knowledge so much. I am just so grateful to be able to go there and have a community and a sense of place there too, that it feels more like a part of me now. It is such a nice extension of my other [city] home with all its reminders of people moving, energy sharing. - All things I love and get a lot out of, but the nature upstate has softened me and allowed some recognition for being a woman, and slightly even domestic. It may be slightly taboo to say that; up there I want to take care of myself and my partner and cook and be domestic in a way that just did not reveal itself while living in the city. And as I get older it is nice to come home to myself in new ways, by exploring New York State essentially - just driving two hours north and I find a whole new side of myself!
L: That is so interesting! And isn’t it incredible how nature does not even have to be out of the city? Parks are such vital treasures. It is such a luxury to get away to hikes or waves, but as humans we are so adaptable that we can get used to finding nature growing up in between cracks in the asphalt, just like we find love in the weirdest places.
C: Yes! It’s amazing! You said it best, we are adaptable. Those 16 years of living in the city I didn’t feel a deficit per se, without this Hudson Valley escape, I didn’t feel deprived. I notice nature and appreciate it in the city - it’s an island, there’s water all around and that feels very special to me. And then this whole other revolution and realization of self of truly being in and around nature, I am speechless about it. I cannot imagine life without it now in some sense.
L: Before you had the sudden chance to access the space you go to upstate, had you even tried to or manifested something like that for your life?
C: No, not at all! Honestly, when my mum passed, it was summer in the city and the noise and everything felt like it was touching my bones. - It started feeling as if the city wasn’t just around me, but it was penetrating me in a way that I felt I needed some relief and a break. And as this subletting situation came up and I was trying to think of who of my friends could benefit from this opportunity, and it struck me that maybe I could! Like, laying in the field for the month of July!? And it was absolutely magical. So healing, so cathartic, so nourishing. I am so grateful that it came up at that time because I did not seek it out, it was not something we thought we could do. But wow, what balance it has brought. Then the other side of that is that once you get that taste, then ooooof….I wrestle with this idea whether this is just a requirement now? Is this a part of my life that I can’t ignore anymore? Life changes, where we live changes, and work does, but now, I am recognizing a bigger picture of what really feels the most beneficial to being the most full version of myself, and how to make that work.
Although I don’t feel like a landscape painter, many of my works are very much landscapes.
- Colleen Herman
Longview: There are certainly a lot of natural connections in your work, amongst others through paintings with titles such as ‘Mother Mountain’, ‘Trees’, ‘Roadside Bouquets’, ‘Lush’, ‘Wildflowers’, ‘Hierba’, ‘Leaves’, but also in colors and hues both as bright as sun glare and as grimy as mud. In what ways, if any, does the natural world shape your work or the way you work?
C: Oh, I mean, it’s like one and the same. I feel that in my painting practice nature is truly shaping the palettes I’m gravitated towards, the marks that I make or the compositions that reveal and pile themselves up on the canvas.
Sometimes, like the “Hot House” show last year in LA, I was building an indoor garden!
Around my studio in Bushwick it is very masculine with trucks and noise and industry, but inside the studio nature just started to come out. - It comes out in the way that I am painting a field that stretches out and feels infinite and expansive. A field that at once comfortable to lay down in and also with so many elements to look at and occupy your mind, to chew on and think about growth and change and cycles and seasonality - even if it’s not like I’m not painting flowers or grass or skies specifically, but this is what I am seeing after the fact. I do the work and am immersed in the process and then I step back and like ‘fuck, it’s another field!’. I am just painting where I want to be in a sense. Or where I want to be to have a magical mind, or think about things in an expansive way. Like we talked about, having that horizontal wide expansive vision.
Or sometimes the work feels like maybe I am a bee and in the center of the flower and everything is so intense and micro, a dance between being in this tiny world experiencing this sensation of two colors meeting or it’s like, cosmic. So I feel nature is everywhere in the work. Although I don’t feel like a landscape painter, many of my works are very much landscapes. And I am not a flower painter, but I paint a lot of flowers both unintentionally and intentionally. I think of the work as purely color driven, but where am I inspired by color? Everywhere in nature! - All the neons I use I see in nature. It’s so exciting to think of for example bioluminescence, that iridescent colors exist in living beings!
L: It is truly impressive to see that inner landscape being brought to life inside your studio - when looking out at the wide view from the fourth floor of an old factory building in the industrial part of Bushwick, but one filled with completely different surfaces and colors, of rooftops, asphalt, all the dust.
C: Hahaha! And it’s hard to find a tree out here - I know there is a little group of five trees over there on Morgan Ave, and their leaves are changing and I am so grateful for that seasonal reminder right here. But in the studio it’s all about the sky. Because when I am working on the floor I don’t even see the buildings. It’s all about what is happening above, the light changing.
It is so special to have a studio in Bushwick, but to be so inspired upstate and using that transition we were talking about to bring it all back down into the studio to really work through it. I feel full, I feel potent in a sense that comes through my hands or that comes through the work or the dance around the canvas. In a way I think that if I had a studio upstate, the work would be so different. Like would I be painting fields in a field? I don’t think so!I don’t know! Or would everything be slick and geometric? Who knows! But it is definitely a response to the environment and part of the transitional rhythm.
L: Do you feel a pressure to bring something back with you then? In terms of inspiration?
C: No, it is definitely not a pressure. If anything it feels like a release. It’s inevitable. To go up there and not let it seep into every pore of your skin. Something changes. And I’m actually trying to figure out if it is Hudson Valley specific to me, or could this occur elsewhere too, or is it the sky in the Hudson Valley that I am obsessed with because truly it has affected artists from Frederic Church and Thomas Cole and now Kiki Smith, and of course Brice Marden and Suzan Frecon. There are so many amazing artist whom are really indelibly marked by the environment of the Hudson Valley and that’s coming through their work in all of these different ways. Like for artists in so many places around the world; I believe it’s something in the earth, something in the food that you are eating, that can feel very symbiotic. And it is nice to know that there is a community of artists who are experiencing that too.
L: With this strong connection, it is an interesting thought experiment to imagine what your work would be like if you did not have this chapter that entered you into this particular natural space.
C: Oh, yes, my mum totally took me there! Thanks mom!!! I was painting before 2019 and it was fully abstract, which it still is and not, but it was more chaos - it was noisy when I look back at it. It wasn’t as grounded feeling. It is weird that achieving this landscape feeling from that one can get from my paintings is certainly not something I am trying to do. It is something that is the outcome of doing. There is certainly a flow state that I get into when I am working. I am not trying to do anything really, except to push color around and have a dialogue about that. But then when I step back and take in the work, it’s another field hahahaha. Whoooops! Haha. Nature painter!
L: Which plant materials do you find yourself often drawn towards in your creative process, as well as in your daily life?
C: Wow. Okay. I love marijuana. Hehehee.
L: As part of your creative process?
C: For sure. I think it’s always been there. That seeped in through college and it’s nice that it’s now legalized and not as stigmatized. It softens the edges. But in other ways…I used to be a big bodega flower girl, and get the flowers and set up and maybe be inspired. I always bought the tackiest colors, the clearly dyed ones, the most unrealistic flowers. But after befriending you, and Alex [Crowder] of Field Studies Flora, and Marisa [Competello, of Metaflora] and all these beautiful people who work with flowers in such a unique way - I actually realize now that I have a lot of friends that work in flowers, it’s an interesting attraction.- I have a different take on the bodega flowers hahah.
L: No shame.
C: No shame, but oh, I’ve been woken up to the issues around bodega flowers. So my plant materials have become more like stones or other natural elements that make their way into the studio, that become little talismans. Just observing so much when I am in the trees, I feel less the need to bring nature inside. It is inside me. If I do pick up flowers now it’s from the farmers market, as a way to connect with what’s in bloom as part of the cycles of the season. It’s a reminder of time and that relationship has grown over the years, getting to know what is growing now. Bringing that into the house and letting it be there for a long time. - Watching the colors drain out of flowers is so interesting! Even out of the greenest green leaves, everything turns beige! And it still looks beautiful, but all of a sudden it looks more like ceramic. Even the texture changes. I find that truly fascinating.
L: This time of year is a real shift in seasons - from summer to fall, leaves turning and colors changing, and temperatures changing too, making our entire being feel different. How do you relate to these seasonal cycles, if at all?
C: So much! - I didn’t know or recognize this until this past summer, that I’m a summer lover. Wow. I finally know that summer is my thing. - I live for July and August and all the verdant high greens and all the vitality that is so present in the lushness of the trees, and the grass and the forest and the fields. It’s all mind blowing. It feels like the energy is so high, everything is at its peak and everything is so energized. And it’s just really palpable.
L: Yes, buzzing!
C: It’s buzzing everywhere! And it all feels so good. And then these past weeks everything is crinkling, trees are turning yellow, leaves are falling, the trees are about to get undressed really, and go dormant. And it’s like ooof, sometimes I find myself wanting to grip for that vitality, that freshness and aliveness. But it’s a good reminder that we humans need to hibernate in a sense and go in and be contemplative, and that is exciting in its own way. It’s about building fires and making soups and going to bed early, living in harmony with that change as opposed to gripping and desiring something else. Letting it all happen, because summer will come again and it’s so beautiful to appreciate these transitions and going with it instead of fighting it. And it definitely affects the palette that I’m drawn to! In the summer all my paintings are fluorescent and I can’t help it because I feel so high, but it’s not the same when I’m painting in November. Then I’ll pick more jewel tones, darker, more earthy in a different way then the way fluorescents are also earthy. It becomes heavier. I think they weight of the colors really shift, as opposed to this light airy fairy feeling. Everything becomes more serious, which is how I think of winter. The long nights, a lot of time to be contemplative, a heavier time.
L: Do you have a favorite time of day? Are there any rituals you connect with this time?
C:I am a morning person for sure. I feel energized by the hope of morning or something. There’s this poster art piece that says ‘In the Morning There’s Meaning’, and that resonates in so many ways. It’s become a ritual time to get up and address the body, take in lots of water, take a cold shower and sit down and meditate. That’s my way to start the day. And with that discipline, of keeping that ritual even through the seasonal changes, being upstate or downstate, it doesn’t matter where I am, just starting the day in the same way sets a tone that I have noticed yields for me a certain self respect. For just having a practice, and feel intentional about the way I regard how to fortify my container, which feels important. The body container, the mind container. And then this can spill into the day or the work in whatever way, but having that ritual every day feels purposeful.
L: We love how you have reinvigorated the strong New York tradition of women’s art meetings, with the ever growing and resourceful Sunday Salon group! Meeting regularly in studios and workshops to share work and discuss the intersections of projects, work and life with such a varied group of creatives is truly such a treasure. Artistic humans aside, what do you think of as your plant community?
C: The Salon group really does feel like a community, it feels like a supportive network that really genuinely isn’t competitive, but is uplifting and celebratory. It is supportive in nature and that feels essential when being a creative maker in the city - to tap into resources and ask questions, and not just be so isolated in our studios all day long. To me my plant community is so intrinsically linked to my artistic community, like my flower friends, and beyond!
And outside of that, the incredible people and community who tend to all the community gardens in my neighborhood in the East Village. We’re so lucky to have so many gardens, like the magic garden on 6th street between B and C. Getting to hold a key to any of these spaces definitely makes the volunteering so worthwhile. - You pay by shoveling rats and the like haha! There are all these people who spend their time volunteering to create all these beautiful spaces in between tall buildings. The people who really care for the green spaces in New York City feel like plant people community that I love and support and wish to be as much a part of as I can. It’s these spaces and these people that make the East Village feel like my neighborhood. - It’s more than just Tompkins Square Park which feels like my backyard, it’s also all the little gardens that one can dip into and read a book and be by oneself. And again, the care that goes into that. Someone who wants to get their hands in the dirt, but happens to live on 7th street, that’s so cool. I think they’re my plant people.
L: Do you find yourself turning to plants for medicine, cooking or healing? Or for something else?
C: Mmm. Mmm. Mmm! Yes! Well, my plant based diet is very very very important to me. So I do think of plants as nourishment and healing, and tinctures, essential oils and things like that are the go-to for me before anything sort of conventional Western medicine. I have healed certain issues with an Ayurvedic diet, or even with topical treatments on the skin. Plants, I feel, are the resources. We have kind of fucked it up in the laboratories, but going back to the source that is so plentiful for us to tap into is huge. And, the past few months I have been imbibing more psilocybin, and seeing how that affects me and my practice and my state. It has been hugely beneficial upon reflection. I feel like plants are the fuel. Fuel for the body as food, but also a bigger sense of fuel and energy that makes everything work.
L: Right, spiritual and energetic fuel too. Perspectives.
C: Yes, and what we put on our skin, what we are consuming, all the things. The more natural elements I feel are going in, the more in harmony I feel with everything that is going on around me. It makes me feel like I am in a flow that is going with the current. My plant based way of life is a perspective that is about sentient beings, about life, not a dietary focus, which came to me through my yogic practice. As one way of living. - One of the strongest tenets in yoga is ahimsa, nonviolence, it even comes before satya, truth. Ahimsa is the numero uno and says that I am not going to harm other living beings for my sake. So our diet is a natural extension of that. But it is also non-harming by not thinking negative thoughts or talking shit about someone, and the list goes on and on, but the diet is so major. In my mind it’s inevitable that there is a shift in perception and relationship to life, animals and other, when not consuming meat.
L: We cannot help but think of your grand horizontal canvas called ‘An Unfinished Garden’ (2021) - Can you describe your dream garden.(Or a garden from a dream?!)
C:Wow. A few years ago I had the good fortune of biking to Giverny, Claude Monet’s Garden. Which is a memory that comes to mind first. I knew the pictures of the bridge and I knew his paintings deeply in my bones from when I was young, but to experience this setting of home and studio and this absolutely living painting of flowers and gardens! How he did it for the love of it! Wow! Wow. Kind of in the way that Piet Oudolf works, going with the seasons and the environment, being in harmony with what’s in bloom and what’s not and what’s ever changing. So I guess in a sense the dream garden for me is this lush colorful landscape that shifts with the seasons and feels somewhat wilds. Not the manicured topiary of my youth essentially, but more like Claude and Piet.
I wonder, am I a gardener - would I be out there toiling away? It’s a lot of physical labor and planning, and so time consuming. But at the same time I don’t imagine having someone else doing it if I ever lived in a place like that. No no - it would be an extension of the practice. And that is why Monet comes to mind, as the art practice that extends into my real life in a way that is living in the world that I am creating. Growing something that is natural to its environment and watching it change through over time. Seeing trees actually grow and get to know blades of grass in a different way by being in a symbiotic relationship.
