Revealing the marvellous

Albert Herbert has described art as being not about “meanings but feelings”. His is an art concerned with revealing the inner world, the 'marvellous', feelings, and through these, the collective mind. He has spoken of the way in which, at the age of 16, he found a surrealist magazine and responded immediately to art that “was about revealing the ‘marvellous’ and of the superiority of the inner world to the world of appearances.”

His expression of these ideas involved learning to see and paint as children do. "I learned to draw again as if from the beginning, drawing what I felt and knew rather than what it looked like." A painting usually starts with some idea that could be put into words but when he begins to paint he becomes fully involved in "the struggle to harmonise shapes, colours and textures". This can go on for several months with the original idea becoming lost in the paint only to re-emerge as something quite different. In this way he both draws his images from his subconscious and integrates them into the wholeness of the painting. His approach tallies with that of another contemporary painter, Ken Kiff. Kiff, too, argues that his subconscious images only achieve meaning through the process of shaping and forming the painting. The painting, as a whole, must be discovered, by the artist, bit by bit. This has to happen in order "for the thing to really grow together and be significantly all part of the same growing thing". In this growth there can be a sense of peace, completeness and wholeness despite the presence, at times, of disturbing imagery.

For Herbert, like John Reilly, the stories of the Bible cannot be bettered for revealing universal and timeless truths. “The Bible stories are treated as symbols, metaphors, revealing the ‘marvellous’, an intention”, says Herbert, “which I first discovered in that surrealist magazine long ago.“ "The painting of Moses climbing the mountain and speaking to God in a cloud, is about the incomprehensible; God is beyond understanding, it is the revelation coming from outside the tangible world of the senses. It cannot be put better than in this Biblical image of something hidden from you by a cloud; and you going upwards with great difficulty, away from the ordinary world, and looking for something hidden from you."

Sister Wendy Beckett has described Herbert as a “religious painter of genius” while Patrick Reyntiens has said that he is “the most significant religious painter to emerge in England in the 1980’s”. Specialist appreciation is one thing but general acceptance another altogether. When Herbert prepared a series of Stations of the Cross for a London church they were rejected. Herbert’s deliberate child-like style can be a barrier to appreciation but, for those prepared to look, it strips away surface distractions and gets the viewer to real correspondences and motives.

In Jesus is Stripped of His Garments II (1987) the vulnerability of God is clearly shown in the centre of a crowd of nightmarish faces and grasping hands. The best response to make to this work is also a simple descriptive one as the actor Griff Rhys Jones did in writing about Herbert’s Jonah and the Whale in the RA magazine. “This painting is very straightforward. It’s a pictorial respresentation of a woman trapped in one circumstance and a man trapped in another, and the way the colours link together is rather impressive. It’s quite a complicated idea expressed very simply.”

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