Drawing Through Writing/Writing Through Drawing:
the Gestalt of John Himmelfarb’s Prints
June 1999

John Brunetti

An accomplished artist in a full range of graphic mediums, John Himmelfarb has been an active printmaker throughout his career. The medium’s diversity is a perfect vehicle for his restless creative energy that fuels his search for meaning in non-western alphabets, ancient hieroglyphs, pictographs and totemic iconography. Himmelfarb’s resulting abstractions are evocative gestalts of language, image, and thought.

Himmelfarb has always embraced the Renaissance notion of drawing as an extension of handwriting, closest to recording the immediacy of the artist’s observations and states of mind; a fusion of verbal and visual language. In his paintings, drawings and prints, recording the various intonations of his hand, (and by association, his thoughts) whether the bold fluidity of thick and thin brushstrokes, the edgy crispness of pencil and pen, or the smeary lushness of pastel and crayon, has been the essence of Himmelfarb’s oeuvre; a resonating amalgam of Surrealist automatism, the “writing” paintings of Abstract Expressionist Mark Tobey, the forceful bluntness of Art Brut, the mythical imagery of the CoBrA artists, and the saturated, emotional color of the Fauves. However, it is the particular nature of the printmaking processes which eliminate the scale and tactility of painting, as well as the palpable nature of Himmelfarb’s mixed media drawings, that perhaps provides the clearest guide to the relationship between drawing and language that is the foundation for much of his work.

Whether using lithography, etching, or screen printing, Himmelfarb focuses on several formal and conceptual concerns that have been rich sources for him; 1.) line and contour as a primary formal element that directs movement and delineates space; 2.) manipulation of positive and negative space (field and ground) as articulated by the open and closed forms of his alphabets and symbols; 3.) an interest in the visual structures of languages to organize the pictorial field; 4.) the complex relationships between the signified, signifier and the interpreter that provides a guide to understanding unfamiliar icons, symbols and metasymbols.

One gets lost in the unusual beauty that is evoked in the rigorous discipline of Himmelfarb’s private languages. His voice speaks with complete authenticity, though his signs, symbols and icons remain deceptive fabrications. Animal and human pictographs from Neolithic societies, fragments of religious symbols from diverse cultures, the earth drawings from ancient Peru, Asian and Arabic alphabets, are some of the sources suggested by Himmelfarb’s obsessively detailed cryptography. Creating compositions that resemble sacred scrolls, lost tablets and fragments of temple facades, Himmelfarb cultivates one’s curiosity for arcane languages and cultures whose mysteries remain seductive and elusive.

Himmelfarb’s prints can be grouped in several stylistic categories; “Rosetta Stones,” dense, all over images that fill a composition with horizontal rows of compact pictographs; “faux correspondence” of letters, notes and invoices written in the artist’s own language and reminiscent of Leonardo’s sketchbooks; arteries—large, overlapping calligraphic images of bold color—resembling the enlarged excavation plans of lost cities; and intimate monochromatic images resembling Jackson Pollock’s totemic and mythological figures.

The fluency of execution and the complexity of design that characterize the animated hieroglyphs of several of Himmelfarb’s ’90s lithographs and screen prints, such as Tabula Tabula Picta,’93 and Just Follow These, ’98, are an evolution of his quirky and highly detailed grid-based drawings from the early ’70s. But, where the units of marks in these earlier drawings never relinquish their abstract design status, the components of Himmelfarb’s currents prints have a specificity that assigns them a functionality which elevates their seriousness of intent. Decoding his signs is not as important as the gestalt, or oneness, that is accomplished through the signature of gesture, compositional structure and distinctive pairings of symbols and marks.

The intensity of the screen prints Crinkum and Crankum, both from ’97, reveals Himmelfarb’s ability to elicit from calligraphy and symbols a timeless sense of place. Composed of a few wide, twisting and overlapping bands of saturated color that continue off the edge of the picture plane, these images, though abstract, have idiosyncrasies in contour and shape that recall the ancient organizational “arteries” embedded in the ruins of unearthed civilizations. Brought to life again by Himmelfarb’s bold use of color and line, these fragments of obsolete boundaries and passageways reveal the indelible physical and spiritual “signatures” left by anonymous societies.

Prevalent throughout all of Himmelfarb’s prints are the dualities that provide the richness to his work; spontaneity against structure, pattern juxtaposed with image, clarity versus indecipherability. With ease he composes with these contradictions, creating documents where language draws rich images for the eye, and images write beautiful, though unspeakable, languages that communicate directly to the soul.