Amoebas and seedpods are her muse

Raised in the bucolic Berkshires of rural Massachusetts, mixed-media artist Ali Herrmann developed an early interest in the raw beauty of the natural landscape, the ever-changing seasons and the region’s rich flora and fauna. She practiced art from as far back as she can recall, dancing at age 3 and moving on to fine arts. “Unfortunately, being in honors programs in high school, the curriculum did not allow time for art classes, so I naturally gravitated to excel in math and science,” she said. She studied biology at Colgate, but eventually transferred to Bennington College in Vermont to study fine art with the flexibility to carve out the curriculum she wanted.

“I consider the move from Colgate to Bennington a ‘course correction,’ a shift back towards my true calling, one in which I used Bennington’s interdisciplinary program to connect art and science in my work,” said Herrmann. Her love of organic sciences would forever inform her work, leading her to explore cellular structures that would become the origin for her abstract paintings. Creating what she terms ‘microbiome landscapes,’ Herrmann engages with the natural world as the inspiration for the color combinations and repetitive patterns in her paintings, lithography prints and original books. Like a scientist looking through a microscope, she examines the beauty of natural forms to inform the motifs in her work: cells, amoebic shapes, seedpods and flowers. “Mother Nature is the greatest creator, she never gives us just one,” she said. “Nature just keeps pushing forward, persevering, and I also let that inform how I approach my practice.”

Herrmann describes her artwork as an attempt to emulate what she feels when she’s in nature: gardening, hiking, watching a sunset, or going on a leisurely bike ride. “You can learn a lot by just walking down the street and noticing the roots of a tree pushing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Nature is the force that is going to prevail, not the sidewalk!” she said. “This is where the connectivity happens to inspire the art: the shape of the cracks, the way the root system overtakes and morphs with the cracks, and even the idea that the crack formed to let the roots out. All these observations lead to an idea, which lead to a sketch and then become informative to paintings and prints.” And when the inspiration is tested, she heads back outside to wait for the next creative hit. “Just wait, because there’s always more to be impressed by in nature,” she said. The nature-derived ideas that most inform her work “are the binary ideas of chaos and order, the continuous cycles of growth and decay, and the seemingly endless palette of colors that I experience every waking moment.”

Over her three-decade artistic career she has exhibited around the Northeast, earning not only accolades but all-important grants, from the New York State Council for the Arts (2023, 2022); A.R.T. fund, NY (2020); Martha Boschen Porter Fund Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, MA (2019, 2014) and a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant (2017).

Along the way, Herrmann also began incorporating recycled materials in her work, like discarded paper and used coffee filters, old National Geographic magazines, dress pattern papers inherited from her grandmother and boxes of paint chip samples. It started almost by accident, but making a conscious effort to reuse discarded material has since become a signature of hers. “My grandmother lived in an era of saving everything she possibly could, so very little went into the trash,” said Herrmann. “As the person who pushed me to pay attention to my art practice, I felt a deep and loving connection to my grandmother, so I attempted to use this dress pattern paper to honor her.” She sampled the sheer paper in a series of encaustic portraits of women – a painting technique using heated wax to create an enamel-like finish – using it as a connective tissue between the portraits.

The experience piqued her curiosity about other non-art papers that could offer translucency and transparency. Epiphany arrived in the form of “a hugely explosive episodic mess,” she said. “While attempting to make a simple pot of drip coffee, I realized I had another answer right in my hands: a coffee filter! But, of course for practical purposes it had to be used first, and also to give it character.” Herrmann also draws from another source of material: her own artwork. “I have finished pieces and finished-for-now pieces, the latter of which get reworked so that I am not just making another piece with new material. I find that this transformation of reworking, layering and revisiting breathes new life into my work and allows me to be respectful to myself, my resources and the environment.”