SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

War II, like Herb, and they remained fond allies, perhaps against the family that placed little
value on the endeavors of artists and visionaries.
Of course, no two souls drink from quite the same fountain of memory. My uncle is from
another generation, another childhood household. His enormous talent also separates him
from me, only a sentimental storyteller. Even so, these elegant and magical marks on paper,
evoking his world, which was the world imprinted upon me in my earliest years, came as a
fabulous gift.
Sometimes Herb will call or write and ask me if I can locate one of the children’s books he
remembers. There was one about a miraculous and elfin tree, with strange illustrations. For me,
that tree could have been any of the elms, oaks, maples, that grew on the hillside between his
parents’ homestead and my own, three houses down from his. Because Herb has always
showered me with beautiful images from his own mind and hand. These latest efforts, going
back to his roots in the Bible, bring me a fresh shock.
He has also reviewed the great and tragic stories from the Torah—Abraham sacrificing Isaac,
Adam and Eve leaving Eden, Job stripped of everything, even relief from the cruel light of the
great sun, reminding me again of how universal and eternal those tales are. We lived in a very
small world, an oval street carved from a farm, a ranch, an orchard, a wetland, but it contained
and predicted everything. Herb and Polly lost two sons in accidents. Herb’s Biblical sketches
make these tragic events the elements of a universal and mythic drama. Yet, prophetically, he
had also drawn Job in charcoal as a student—I found the sketch in that abandoned trunk.
Nobody can draw the human figure with Herb Fink’s superb and inspired craftsmanship, a
unique mixture of observed detail imbued with the deepest of feelings and the most symbolic of
metaphorical alchemy.
He can bring the dead back to life with a pen as his wand and me as witness.
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