originally published 4/22/2014

In Through Your Eyes: Dialogues on the Paintings of Bruce Herman (Eerdmans, 2013), theologian Walter Hansen and painter Bruce Herman question contemporary conceptions of meaning that confine it to the verbal or consider visual and verbal meaning to be completely exclusive. As we view art, we cannot simply be passive recipients of it. As settings change and we change, we will view artworks differently and gain new insights from them. We cannot translate this meaning fully into verbal meaning; it goes beyond that. Indeed, the visual and the linguistic intersect, or as Herman puts it, “dance.” When viewing a portrait or any work with a human likeness, we engage with this face in a certain way. Putting a human likeness into a work, Herman says, creates a target: the viewer will immediately focus on it, sometimes at the expense of other features of the work. Meaning, in this sense, is embodied. We have a certain hunger for the human visage and we derive meaning from it. To reduce this experience to the purely verbal would be to needlessly impoverish our conception of meaning. This interview was originally published on Volume 121 of the Journal.

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