NATURE PAINTS ITSELF
Painting is a way of experiencing place, the simultaneity of looking with the eye and the touch of the paintbrush is akin to a conversation. The painter is just a part of the process.
— Jeremy Herndl
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Flycatcher Maple
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Forest View
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Night Poppies
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View From the Outside
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Natural Habitat
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The Architects House
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Bouquet Sauvage
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Visiting the Old Oak
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Pouch Cove
Painting is a medium at the intersection of place and painter and these are understood to be mutually defining. This reciprocal relationship between individual and environment embraces the shifting appearances and interactions that occur over days and weeks.
In my practice, I am witness to the politics and legacies of the land: the ravages of colonialism, property and privilege, industry and gentrification. My landscape paintings are always about people, whether overtly in the subject matter (urban, rewilded, still life) or endangered forests and ecosystems in transition.
My landscape painting considers space as an extension of the body where perception is reciprocal and all things have agency in an intersubjective field. What I touch also touches me. Seeing and hearing are extensions of touch and so the act of painting is also simultaneously an act of seeing and touching. “Nature” is not something else, it doesn’t reward us or punish us, it IS us. My work examines the human as an expression of nature, it is all one body and this informs my contemporary approach to pleinairism.
— Jeremy Herndl
Commissions
View Through the House, 2023
This commissioned painting was for a client in London Ontario who was building a new home on Georgian Bay, by Verge. The client asked for a painting that would measure 96x60 inches to be placed in their bar and after several conversations we agreed that I should travel to Georgian Bay to make the work on site.
I arrived with my custom field easel and rental van and over the first several days, I explored the area to find inspiration for their painting. Knowing they appreciated some of my edgier work, I created three to scale watercolours for them to choose from. The clients decided on the third option and for the next few weeks I worked among the other trades on the construction site creating a painting that documents this extraordinary house when it was under construction.
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Fairy Creek Blockade
Painting the Black Cedar at Eden Grove near Port Renfrew, BC, the first of five portraits of the Ancient Cedars under threat of clear cut logging.
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Camp Namegens
Painting as advocacy in an unhoused community in Victoria, BC, with permission from the residents. Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
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Teck II
Painting the terrifying beauty of Teck Cominco in Trail, BC, one of the most destructive industrial projects in North America.
