herman de vries
chance and change
Mel Gooding
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‘Clear, concise yet detailed …
Mel Gooding presents us with a deeply thoughtful, concerned, knowledgeable, and still playful, artist who has had significant influence on both his audience and fellow artists’ | | – landartnet.org |
herman de vries is one of the greatest living artists working with nature.
He offers no representation of landscape or of nature, of light, of air or of perspective. His aim is quite simply to present nature as itself. The intelligence that lies behind his work is subtle, ingenious, reflective and steeped in knowledge of both eastern and western philosophies. de vries’s early training as a botanist broadens his frame of reference still further.
de vries’s art springs from a profound awareness of the present disjunction between people and their natural environment, his conviction that a proper contemplation and experience of nature is essential to living in any meaningful sense, and an intuitive certainty that the careful persuasion and prompts embodied in his work will nudge us in the right direction.
Like nature itself (or as de vries would probably say, because it is nature itself), his work bears limitless viewing. His smaller scale works often involve sampling and collecting: an array of leaves taken from one willow branch; earth rubbings in widely varying colours; cherry leaves fixed where they fell on a piece of paper beneath their tree …. Often, a purposeful symbolism or association is involved: an exhibition of earth samples taken from Chernobyl, handwritten lists of vanished Scottish forests and bundles of branches representing the trees felled.
In this beautiful book, the distinguished writer on art Mel Gooding contributes a critical overview of de vries’s work, setting it in an art historical context and appraising it as an important reflection of the cultural consciousness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Mel Gooding is the author of numerous highly regarded books on contemporary art and artists, including Song of the Earth, also published by Thames & Hudson.
Also of interest
Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape
Chris Drury – Silent Spaces
Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976–1990
Richard Long: Walking the Line
Richard Long: A Walk Across England
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|  |  | | | | ISBN 050009327X | | ISBN-13 978-0500093276 | | | | 28.5 x 26.0 cm | | Hardback | | 144pp | | 268 illustrations, 218 in colour | | First published 2006 | | | | £32.00 | | | |  | | | | 
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