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ReactionsPinkney Herbert's gestural, animated canvases evoke an old time blacksmith's shop, where fire and water collide at the hands of an experienced craftsman. Most of his paintings emanate a red-hot interior light and bear fitting titles like Cauldron and Firefall. Amid wild full-body gestures of brushwork and splatters, more restrained (though no less active) marks are made by the artist's own fingertips, removing thick, oily layers of paint to reveal luminescent glazes beneath... Herbert's high contrast, energetic paintings evoke the elements in a primal way, but they are by no means simple.
Benjamin McKamey "With oil paints, you need a recipe; it's like cooking. But charcoal and pastels are instant—the results are right there in front of you," says Memphis artist Pinkney Herbert, whose 1997 pastel on paper Penland conveys the essence of experience through symbolic forms. "You make this mark, and the pastel dust leaves a trail of residue," says Herbert. "There is something visceral about the dust it leaves behind, as if it were the trace of where you've been. There is some sort of wonder in that."
Donna Dorian Wall Another recent and particularly strong work, an oil painting titled Embedded, refers obliquely to the journalists covering Iraq; Artificial Parts, also done in oil, began with those wounded there, as well as a personal heart scare that Herbert recently endured. As in another work, Transplant, biomorphic forms swell and swirl across the surface, equally anatomical and cartoonish in the vein of Philip Guston or Carroll Dunham, although Herbert is clearly more interested in the graceful than the ugly. While he has moved from figuration to abstraction, the body makes itself felt in these powerful works.
Katy Siegel Pinkney Herbert's exuberantly colored canvases and works on paper reveal the powers of the imagination open at full throttle... [he] portrays for us our own tempest-tossed worlds of busy-ness—the sometimes marching in place, the moments of courageous confrontation, and the call and response cadence of human interactions.
Susan W. Knowles People have an attitude about abstract artists. Call it the Hell-I-could-paint-that syndrome. But Pinkney Herbert's abstract drawings on giant squares of unwaxed milk carton have a shimmering, crackling energy that converts nonbelievers. A product of the Memphis art scene, Herbert is steeped in Southern lore, and his decadent, dripping approach to life and sex explodes into every corner of his paper—and viewers' imaginations.
[New Orleans] Gambit Herbert's gestural compositions reflect a spirit of unchecked happiness and pleasure in good old-fashioned painting.
Glenna Park The drawings are beautiful. They suggest the cycle of death and resurrection, charged with swift strokes and brilliants color. We see it in the rich natural forms of pods, nests and birds and we hear it in the swirling storm of musical sounds.
Blue Greenberg What is this new world Pinkney Herbert has created? He paints the reality we feel versus the reality we see. Capturing the energy of the situation, his colors and shapes swirl around the canvas like dancing molecules, pulling, twisting, sucking, turning, crushing, falling, and vibrating. Herbert's inventive paintings have an improvisational quality, and his smooth application of paint in the foreground contrasts stringly to the textural backgrounds.
Art students from Nashville University School Race always matters in American culture, and here in Memphis, the interchange between folk art (usually black) and fine art (white) is almost as evident as it is in a city like New Orleans. Take, for example, 40-year-old white artist Pinkney Herbert and black folk artist Hawkins Bolden. Herbert creates large-scale oil-stick drawings in which vast whorls and funnels of energy weave themselves through an open pictorial space. In Memphis's tiny artistic community, Herbert regards Bolden, an octogenarian who has been blind since the age of eight, as very much a peer, though it's unlikely that his fellow citizens still think of Bolden as more a character than an artist.
Dan Cameron In Yell by Pinkney Herbert, we see an abstraction or visual analogue for sound... [the painting] is a dynamic image of a loud burst of noise. The artist has incorporated an abstract image of vocal chords and mouth cavity on the right side of his composition. In the portrayal of the sound being emitted, we sense that the noise wavers and changes pitch, qualities expressed by the wave-like patterns that churn in the space of the painting. The sound is obviously strong: the "mouth" recoils from its force.
Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel Like Kandinsky or Motherwell, Herbert's improvisational cosmology engages and enlightens through its sophisticated, jazzy language of form and color. These non-objective works need no further interpretation, no external justification for their power; order and disorder merge in a sublime expression of the life force: dense and teeming as a specimen slide of primordial ooze, clear and bright as a starry, starry night.
LD Beghtol Pinkney Herbert uses the act of painting to suggest the flow of thought. The loopy, almost calligraphic, forms that inhabit his fields of swirling color are as connected to writing as they are to process, speaking to the artist's awareness of the proximity of the gestural to the scriptual in painting... Herbert paints pictures of abstraction, making us see through the expressive energy of his work to the meditation of method that guides the brush in his hand.
Buzz Spector Herbert paints like an abstract expressionist on steroids, turning nuanced color fields into seas of conflagration. His 6' 5" frame allows him to gesture across entire canvases, covering their surfaces with firestorms, tidal waves, and whirlwinds... From the incinerating rivers and tropical earth of Firefall to the clay-like impastos, gentle rain, and wide-open sky of Wing, Herbert is a master of all the elements, producing some of the sparest, most stunning work of his career.
Carol Knowles Pinkney Herbert's work has intrigued me from the first moment because it is undeniably powerful, because it projects great confidence, and, frankly, because it is disturbing.
Susan W. Knowles With the addition of the graceful Zen-like painting Wing to his repertoire, in 2006 Herbert both depicted the fierceness of the times and embraced a more contemplative state of mind.
Carol Knowles Firefall is not the spark that humanized a species of apes and allowed moms to produce apple pies. This is the mesmerizing, irresistible, enveloping, devouring beast that roars across landscapes and desolates mountains and cities; it is natural, beautiful, and dangerous unless tamed and contained.
Leslie Luebbers Herbert's forceful combination of black with a full spectrum of color encourages the viewer to identify his art with a system of representation that seems concealed beneath the churning surface.
Dan Cameron |
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| Text and images © 2006 - 2007 Pinkney Herbert, unless otherwise noted. Any duplication is strictly prohibited. |