George Lawson is pleased to present Johanna Baruch’s Himma: Selections from the Cosmos Series.  Himma is a word Baruch discovered that comes from Sufi teachings and means the core of the heart where imagination and rebirth reside, in essence, the power of the heart.  It is associated with meditation, conception, and imagination, the drive of the soul’s desire in intense spiritual resolve. Essentially, it is the pure, active force in human beings found in the origin of creativity.

The German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me.”  The implication of his pronouncement is at the core of Baruch’s painting, in its mirroring forms of microscopic and macroscopic scale, and to the extent that any gaze searching outward inevitably turns its eye in.  Baruch not only paints cosmos; she paints cosmology.  She has found something to paint that has always been there, but has until now been excluded from the contemporary cannon.  Her explorations are not those of a scientist, however, but of an artist.  She is not rendering literally, but viscerally, leveraging the moving forces inside her against those on the outside, her paintbrush functioning as a fulcrum.  She takes off to transform stardust clusters captured by the camera into globular and elastic passages.  Her colors, intentional and saturated, pair high-keyed complimentary hues and dark monochromes.  The photographed shapes get stretched in her hands, becoming more associative, reminiscent of primordial or nautical life.  Baruch pushes and pulls until her pictorial rendering achieves an iconic and binding structure.  In spite of dealing with imagery that is inherently dispersed, she paints with a singularity that is as akin to portraiture as to landscape, always with a centrifugal anchor.  Her real subject matter is genesis.  Her subject motif, her methodology, and her motivation all of a piece, the eye that sees indistinguishable from the eye that is seen, and the vista painted inseparable from the vista to which her painting gains us access.

 — George Lawson