Painting from life, Herd captures the sensitive nature and complexity of his subjects; each work gritty and saturated with information. Herd’s work is overwhelmingly gestural yet intriguingly descriptive. With a focus the figure, his large format portraits are built up using layer upon layer of thickly applied oil paint. Herd takes a sculptural approach to painting: employing a variety of instruments to apply the paint.’ His mark making develops over time; with brushes palette knives, and sometimes paint squeezed directly from the tube. He maintains the gestural nature of his paintings by consciously breaking routine any time he observes it entering his practice. Of this, he states, “It needs to be raw, it needs to be honest”. The pure gestural energy of his mark-making, explores the performative nature of painting and the physical discharge of energy and anxiety; where the subject becomes a vessel for contemplating the human condition.

As such, Herds seated subjects offer introspective moments and issue familiar phycological states - enhanced by his use of colour and the theatrical nature of his compositions. Paring down his compositional arrangements, to the essentials of tone, line and from, he achieves a degree of contemplation/abstraction/extraction by removing superfluous background detail and context for his figures. In this respect, Herd is a master manipulator of paint - his confident & expressive brush work, teems with alluring thick peaks and gestural strokes, that carry with them gestures and energies that are felt as much as they are seen. His paintings rejoice in both the materiality of paint and the mediums ability to preserve a subtle interplay of emotion, vulnerability, and resilience that define the human experience.