Lowell Herrero

Lowell Herrero was born in 1921 in Oakland, California. He has enjoyed a long and multifarious career that began at age six, which has led him from illustration and design, to painting overly large pastoral scenes bursting with life, bountiful harvests, and irrepressible joie de vivre (joy of life). After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Herrero began working in 1949 as an illustrator for Standford & Sanvick in San Francisco. Three years later, he and two other artists founded the San Francisco graphic design agency Butte, Herrero & Hyde, enjoying much success and winning awards for their work with national clients.

Deciding to pursue separate interests, in 1966 the partners dissolved the design agency and Herrero began painting, while working as an independent illustrator. For the next few decades, he painted and exhibited in galleries throughout California, while painting cats and cows for a calendar series by Lang Graphics. An enormous success, the cat and cow series sold millions of calendars.

At age 72, Herrero's life in art made a dramatic shift. He moved into a large studio on Mount St. Helena in Napa Valley, which provided the space to paint in large format. Inspired by Napa, his paintings celebrate nature's beauty and abundance and the deep human connection to it. Feeling a great affinity with the farmers working the land, he began rendering the imaginary pastoral scenes of vineyards and harvests that he is so well known for today. Herrero's love affair with Napa Valley extended to Tuscany, Provence and Spain. Often his canvases portray a peasant couple enjoying a picnic under a cloudless blue sky, farmers shaking olives off a tree, a full-figured woman harvesting lavender in her basket and a Tuscan farmhouse standing sentinel on the horizon.

In 2001, Lowell and his wife, Janet, settled permanently in Napa Valley, where they designed and built a Tuscan farmhouse and studio that seems lifted from his paintings. At 89-years-old, Lowell now spends each day in his Calistoga studio painting the large format, rural landscapes of his enchanted imagination.

Lowell Herrero creates scenes of rural life with the same dignity and joie de vivre with which 19th century artists FranÁoise Millet and Pierre Auguste Renoir approached similar subjects. Neither a documentarian nor a plein-air painter, Herrero has befriended the camera in his travels, using composites of his photographs to stir his creative imagination. Through color and brushstroke, he commemorates life's harvests and the bounty of human labor.

Retaining his allegiance to the draftsmanship perfected in his early career as a commercial artist, Herrero skillfully employs it in his large figural distortion, which has become a signature of his work. Like any serious artist, Herrero is unwilling, maybe even unable, to express in words why he is so strongly compelled to paint the way he does. Drawn to creating figures with intentional exaggerations, Herrero's paintings are clearly his-they are singular and different. Perhaps this is why they are so exceptional.

For more information on Lowell Herrero: PO Box 456 Calistoga, CA 94515; Phone: (707) 942-1533; www.lowellherrero.com.