There's a retrospective of original prints by the world renowned wood engraver, Herbert Waters. It's showing at the Edwards Art Gallery at the Holderness School in Plymouth. In 1993, the State of New Hampshire presented Waters with the Living Treasure Award. NHPR Correspondent Sean Hurley went to the exhibit's opening and offers this review.
For the most part, Herb Waters black ink prints are small – 7 inches by 10 - mostly landscapes. At first glance, there’s a comforting familiarity and realism to the images. Everything is identifiable and clear. But as you move closer and begin to absorb the work, you start to see that while the man-made objects are true in their lines, the mountains and the trees and clouds and rivers are all swimming in their own privately imagined shapes. As with fairytale images, these are places one wants, almost yearns, to visit.
Terry Downs: Look at this thing. It’s so beautiful. How you just want to touch it – and sort of like petting a cat – the way all this image works. And nobody does anything like that. He’s just the best.
That’s Terry Downs a Professor of Printmaking at Plymouth State University. He was also a friend of the Waters and frequent visitor to the “Red House” as everyone called it. Herb and his wife Bertha moved to Campton in 1933 and lived for the better part of their 60 years together in a snug, pretty red house along the side of Cona Mountain. They kept an open home and visitors felt free to stop by. Especially those who lived within walking distance, like Emily and Joe Zabransky.
Emily Zabransky: You not only walked into the house and felt the warmth of the house and the people, but there were always flowers growing and it always smelled so sweet and she had gardens everywhere.
Talking with friends and relatives at this opening, I soon notice a charming, subtle and recurring shift. Whenever I ask questions about Herb and his art – I get answers about their life – Herb and Bertha’s. No one has any doubt that Herb was a great artist and everyone I met had powerful and deeply personal things to say about his work – but those who knew Herb and Bertha are anxious to get to the more important part - and what they want to talk about is how these two people lived their lives and how inspiring it was. Here’s Terry Downs again:
Terry: They were both extraordinary people. I guess they were like a matched set. They came together it seemed.
In 1991, Professor Downs interviewed the 88 year old Herb Waters at his Campton home. The 17 year old tape is scratchy and hard to hear and much of the interview is missing. But the parts that can be heard reveal Waters, the artist, fully aware of his own process:
Herb Waters: There’s a famous German-American wood engraver, Hans Mueller, who said “I impose my will on the block”. I don’t feel that way at all. There are times when you feel you are really asserting yourself, but in general I feel that I am in the position of listening - not taking orders – but listening, you could even say making myself vulnerable and open to whatever will come.
This mixture of assertion and vulnerability shows itself in the freedom and restrained whimsy of his cuts. As Emily Zabransky points out, the prints are serious, but they are also filled with pleasures.
Emily Zabransky: They’re very realistic but at the same time they’re very abstract so that the viewer when he or she looks at it is just traveling around the piece, finding little treasures here and there.
This is a harmony of small contradictions that Rick Carey, Director of Publications at Holderness, believes Herb Waters shares with another well known local artist.
Rick Carey: He had this remarkable capacity, through his art I guess, to unite the work of the hands and the ruminations of the spirit, kind of the the same way Robert Frost managed to do that in many of his poems about rural New Hampshire.
Judith Solberg, who manages the archives at Holderness, told me a story seems to strike at the heart of Herb Waters world.
Judith: The school used to take something called the Mountain Day, and the entire school would go and climb a mountain nearby. And when Herb Waters was here they were doing it and he would often leave early, go to the mountain first, and place himself halfway up and start working on a piece and the students would march by. And he did it one year and had sort of sketched a map for the students to follow to find where he would be. And he made a copy of this map and gave it to some students. Well, after the mountain day he wanted to go back to where he’d been but he wasn’t sure of a path, so he went to the base and asked the lady in the kiosk if there was any map of the mountain so he could find it, she said “Oh well someone came by and made a really detailed map of the area the other day and here you go,” and handed him his own map.
Every artist spends their life making such maps. They might call them poems or paintings or prints. But a special set of directions nonetheless that leads you along to their secret place halfway up the mountain. The retrospective at the Edwards Gallery provides a rare glimpse of the world as Herb Waters saw it. For NHPR News, I’m Sean Hurley.
