Today, my friends and I had a long conversation with Heinrich Toh where he was displaying some beautiful work at a local art show. My usual MO at any art festival is to skim the surface and walk pretty fast stopping though the whole thing, only at booths that have art that pique my interest me then go through once again to look at my choices in more depth.
Heinrich’s work is different. I walked straight to one print that caught my eye and then realized that my attention was getting sucked exponentially into every single print on display. It had me staring and looking at the elements in each piece in a way that I had not looked at art before. Each piece seemed to have multiple layers and multiple levels of significance. Then Heinrich went on to tell us about complex process of making his prints, everything from making the negative images to painting on photographic emulsion to adding color and all the while trying to do this with precision in a dark room. It struck me that perhaps it was his multiple advanced skills with the various mediums was what impressed me. But then I realized that it was something more about the art, the magic, the reason we all get into making art in the first place. Heinrich’s exploration into his own culture’s aesthetic with mixed media had created art that is transcendental and sublime, that is biographical and narrative, all at once.
I think that perhaps too often we are so immersed in our new technologies or we get so caught up in technique (I am SO sick of tilt and shift images), or what is trending, or what people say will sell, that the real art, the real work, the pithy stuff, the stuff with depth, gets shoved aside.
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I did wonder for a second why Heinrich chose to show at a festival in an area with an un-worldly, solipsistic, nice-but-clueless demographic. But then I also noted that he was in good company with a few other extraordinary artists: Patricia DeLeon Alfonso, Rey D’Alfonso, Mark Mackinnon, Ronna Katz and Brent Sanders. I am left with a feeling of hope for Middle America – thank you guys, you truly made my day!
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