biography
Jonathan Herbert is a multidisciplinary artist with a five-decade career. Born in New York in 1952, he trained at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Diploma, 1977).
Herbert’s early work (1970s–80s) focused on oil paintings that explored trauma and addiction—most notably his Views from a Yellow Cab series, which captured New York’s nocturnal energy. A transformative spiritual experience in 1986 marked the beginning of his long-term sobriety.
Shortly afterward, his focus pivoted to digital media. In 1984 he co-founded Herbert Wagner Digital Images. By 1988, he was pioneering computer image creation through ventures including Jonathan Herbert Computer Images and Zero Degrees Kelvin, helping to shape early digital aesthetics.
Returning to painting in 1998, Herbert produced a wide range of landscape and figurative works in oil. His landscapes—from the Montauk dunes to the Piermont marshlands—explored natural stillness and liminality. Concurrently, he developed psychologically driven figurative works, culminating in the Tarot series (2013–2014), which drew on archetypal structures and symbolic systems. That same year, he created the Sephiroth works—an investigation into the Kabbalistic Tree of Life rendered through formal abstraction.
These two bodies emerged in the aftermath of dual lymphoma diagnoses in 2010 and 2012, followed by R-CHOP chemotherapy from December 2012 through early 2013. This period of physical extremity deepened Herbert’s engagement with Western esoteric systems and intensified the role of transformational experience within his work. The Tarot and Sephiroth series mark a passage through vulnerability, symbolism, and intuitive reconstruction.
In 2015, Herbert completed the Formation series, large-scale oils expressing the incomprehensible pressures exerted on the land beneath Manhattan during skyscraper construction—a metaphysical and geological meditation on compression, ambition, and erasure. This marked his full transition into abstraction.
After relocating to Sarasota later that year, he began developing his current methods using hand-formulated acrylic-urethane systems. These hybrid materials—often embedded with ground copper and reflective inclusions—allow for dimensional surfaces that shift with light and require active viewing.
Herbert’s approach is deeply intuitive, rooted in alchemical processes using the five elements—fire, water, earth, air—along with gravity and time. Apparent structure arises organically: geometric precision in his compositions is not imposed but revealed.
His work has been exhibited in solo shows including Kaddish at Urbanite Theater and Cascades: Gravity Paintings at ARTLAB, and appears in collections including The Kinsey Institute, Pfizer Inc., and the Paley Center for Media.
Across his career—from expressionist explorations of human experience to atmospheric abstractions—Herbert has consistently created thresholds between the visible and invisible, material and immaterial, surface and depth.
Portrait of Jonathan Herbert by Virginia Hoffman Photography ©2016 Virginia Hoffman
CURATOR MARK ORMOND ON HERBERT
“When I ask him if he has heroes Herbert tells me that he “likes the cave painters and believes they were shamans.” He also believes in alchemy. In considering Herbert’s work you can see those connections. There is something mystical about his work that is other worldly. It is spiritual in the way it can put you in touch with your soul when you contemplate his art. It can be magical and transformative. Herbert believes that “art puts you in contact with your inner life and takes you to a greater life.” In considering his work, this is possible. Seeing reproductions of his work is a starting point. Being in the presence of the work initiates the journey of discovery. I encourage you to contemplate his work in person.” —Excerpt from an essay by Mark Ormond, Independent curator, art historian, writer, lecturer and consultant in Working Title Magazine.