Pinkney Herbert discovered he wanted to be an artist while still in preschool. One day, his class was playing with tempera paints, and a girl named Katy looked over at Herbert’s picture and smiled at it. As it happened, Herbert had a crush on Katy, and he was stunned to find his art could win her approval. Pleased and proud, he offered her the picture. She accepted, beaming.
For Herbert, that moment was the start of a lifetime of artistic exploration. He has spent the last five and a half decades seeking to express himself and connect to others through his art. The journey has taken him to destinations all over the United States and overseas, furnishing experiences that have led Herbert to the conclusion that he can have more than one home.
Lucy in the Sky, pastel and ink on paper, 22″ x 29″, 2013
Herbert began his life journey—and his preschool art career—in Charlotte, North Carolina. Born in 1954 into a clan of William Pinkney Herberts stretching back to his great-grandfather, his name and the many nicknames it inspires seem perfect for an artist. Growing up, Herbert’s nicknames ranged from “Little Pink,” his mother’s pet name for him, to “Pink Sherbet” to “Pinky Lee,” and, most often, just plain “Pink.” His friends still use a variety of funky nicknames for him. The name in its proper form, Pinkney, began as a surname with roots in France, migrating to England after the eleventh-century Norman conquest. William Pinkney brought the name to America from England, planting the family’s U.S. roots in Maryland.
Nicknames notwithstanding, the young Herbert followed his artistic bent, and his parents encouraged his early desires to become a painter. When he was six, he practiced doodling in the fog on the bathroom mirror while his father shaved, and his mother gave him his first drawing set when he was ten. Yet it was his elementary school art teacher who proved to be one of his most important influences. A native of North Carolina, Tony Birch smoked like a haystack on fire and introduced his students to good music and a guy named Pablo Picasso. He encouraged Herbert’s ambitions by sending him home with teachers’ reports that always read along the same lines: “Pinkney is a good kid, but he needs to spend more time in the art room and less time out playing football.” Although Herbert followed his teacher’s advice and buckled down in the art room, he never abandoned sports, becoming an artist/athlete through high school and college.
At the age of fourteen, Herbert found himself obliged to adhere to the family tradition of sending the kids to boarding school. Life at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, was tough for a young nonconformist, but the discipline he learned there helped him become more self-disciplined in his approaches to his work. Returning to Charlotte for his final year of high school, he discovered another supportive art teacher in Rob Williams and worked part time at a gas station to save money for a trip to Europe. After a summer of Eurail passes, youth hostels, backpacking, and lots of museums, he went back to the States to start his freshman year at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.
During that fall of 1973, Herbert began to worry his parents. He wanted to major in art, and while his parents had been nothing less than encouraging of his interest in art, they had doubts about his ability to support himself as a painter. Neither they nor Herbert knew any artists in the South, let alone ones who could make a profession of the craft. The senior Herbert counseled his son to take classes that he could turn into a steady job. Teaching art seemed most viable, so Herbert added education classes to his roster and student-taught at Memphis University School during his years at Rhodes.
Circuit Tempo, oil and digital print on panel, 48”x36”, 2013
To his parents’ relief, Herbert graduated college with a job offer: a position as an art teacher at Memphis University School. During his teaching stint, he spent much of his free time working on his own paintings. In the classroom, he encouraged his students to experiment, using mediums such as wood, clay, and stop-action video in addition to traditional painting and drawing. Once his students decided to play a practical joke on him and pushed his Volkswagen from the school parking lot to the middle of the classroom. Instead of getting mad, as they thought Herbert would, he left the car where it was and made the students draw it as a still life exercise. His students took his lessons to heart, and one even became a master woodworker which he credits in part to his high school experiments with wood sculpture in Herbert’s classes.
Two years of teaching soon ended to make way for graduate studies at the University of Memphis. Herbert graduated with an MFA in 1982, but even then understood his education was far from finished. He had long had the ambition of living in New York City, mecca of the avant-garde, and found there a second home. He and Janice were still newlyweds when they arrived in the city, and Herbert’s first task was finding an apartment. The first time he met his future landlord, he introduced himself first as Pinkney Herbert, and then, when prompted, quietly admitted he was an artist. The landlord’s robust response: “Son, you’re in New York City! You don’t have to apologize for being an artist.” For Herbert, it was an affirming moment. He soon set up a studio and started painting while Janice took a job with the New York City Ballet. Herbert worked as a contractor on the side to help pay the rent, reminding himself always that he was an artist first. Within a few years, he had participated in a number of group shows, held a solo exhibition, and received an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Yet Herbert did not move to New York to turn into a Northerner. He was glad for his Southern upbringing, believing it helped him navigate a new city with confidence, especially a city that is a destination for chronic soul-searchers. North Carolina grounded the young artist in a sense of place and identity he never lost. He returned to the South in 1989, migrating back to Memphis after he and Janice had their first child, Suzannah. The couple raised Suzannah and her sister Waverley in midtown Memphis while Herbert taught for varying periods of time at the University of Memphis, Memphis College of Art, Rhodes College, and the Penland School in North Carolina. He also held a number of artist residencies at institutions such as the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 1993, Herbert founded Marshall Arts, an alternative gallery and studio space for local, national and international artists that continues to thrive in the Memphis arts community.
Memphis provided some of Herbert’s inspiration through its music. The sound of the city, with its rhythms and colors, applies in many ways to Herbert’s style. Jazz and blues in particular share the abstract qualities of Herbert’s art, some strains even serving as what might be considered a soundtrack to his paintings—or, perhaps, it works the other way around: his paintings could be construed as the visible personification of abstract sound. Herbert’s inspiration, in any case, is far from limited to just one source. Memphis is one inspiration, New York another, with a very different sound: roaring subways, screeching taxis, busy people jaywalking across packed streets. Herbert spent a period of time trying to reconcile the two, his efforts reflected in his body of work entitled “The Bridge.”
Herbert’s bridge was one between South and North, North Carolina and New York, country and city. His reflection stemmed from his experiences living in both regions and his attempt to build a life between them, a major theme in his life at the time. The practice of living and creating for the present, engaging in an intuitive process of awareness, is one he continues today.
Herbert in the Sharp Space Program studio, Brooklyn, New York City, December 2013
Since 2008, Herbert has divided most of his time between Memphis and New York City, with a stint in Cortona, Italy, in 2012 teaching painting and drawing for one of the University of Georgia’s Study Abroad Programs. His 2013-2014 engagement has taken him back to New York, where the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation awarded him a year’s residency in a Brooklyn studio on the East River.
Beginning in 2011, he has expanded his techniques to include digital imagery, a multi-stage process that forms the base of some of his works. Herbert first creates the images on a computer, runs them through a small printer, and then prints a larger version. He then glues them into a collage of sorts on a canvas or a wood panel. He then sometimes chooses to use extra layers of paint or glazes, and after the digital image has been covered over it can be difficult to tell which works are based on digital technology and which are not.
Herbert’s work is on display in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. David Lusk Gallery of Memphis and Nashville and Boy Satellite Gallery of New Orleans both represent him, and he maintains close ties with Greg Thompson Fine Art of North Little Rock, Arkansas, and Fox Gallery of New York. As his professional affiliations show, this artist’s migration from South to North and back has diminished neither his attachment nor his contribution to Southern art.
