Why Add Movement ?

In abstract art there is often a divide between the artist’s intent and the viewer’s interpretation.
How one perceives anything depends the individual’s subjective experience and taste.
Everyone experiences a work of art differently, creating a void between the artist and the viewer.
The original works represented here do not want to be constrained to a stagnate wall.
With the use of custom built mechanical devices they incorporate movement,  allowing these abstract paintings to be viewed from any perspective or direction,
attempting to remove the viewer from one stagnant forced perspective to a point where change and discovery is the new exploration.

 As the artist paints there is a fluidity and movement of the brush.
When Herman Snell looks at a blank canvas he seeks to be a conduit for what the canvas wants to become.
He has no idea what the painting will become when he begins painting it.
It is an evolving exploratory process.
As each of these abstract piece is painted, the artist turns the piece to each side until he finds what the piece is trying to reveal....
trying every angle to find what the painting wants to become. 
It is as if the painting already existed as a life of its own, merely asking the artist to release it through his hands.
The turning and painting continues, side after side, and evolves until it's finished.

 These works are created with a kinetic, living, evolving, element of discovery.
The painting takes the artist on this journey without the artist consciously being aware of its destination.
There is a sort of meditative "automatic painting" that conjures or exorcises the artist's inner depths in its creation.
Like the abstract imagination of dreams, they bend to the sub-conscious realm of living reality.

When a traditional painting is finished and sits still on the wall something in the kinetic discovery aspect of its creation is lost.
A moment in time has been captured, to be examined.  Because of the exploratory aspect of how these paintings were created,
It seems more in their nature to desire to continue their journey of self-discovery.  Its journey does not want to end.
Not that unlike human existence. Each painting seems to express the kinetic aspect of their own creation.
They seem to want to follow their brush stroke patterns of movement, explore and expand beyond their limitations.
These pieces want to turn on the wall, walk across the floor, float in the air, to bloom, to change.
They seem to express a desire to grow beyond there stagnate framed boundaries to break free themselves.

 Each custom movement device tries to expand the painting's strokes & patterns to take on a type of evolving, artificial-life,
where the painting attempts to break free of its sedentary existence and constraints, where the movement of the paints cannot be contained.
They seem to want to expand beyond their boundaries, to "come alive".   They seem to abhor stagnation.
There is no "right way up." This art is meant to be viewed from every possible angle, perspective or direction.
On each side of each canvases there is something to see, feel, or experience in it.
So if you turn them to any side (including upside down) there is something different to see there, thus giving
a standard canvas four different and distinctive perspectives from which one can view it.
(ie. http://www.revolvingpaintdream.com/apic0.html )

 Herman has approximately ten techniques/ideas where several painted abstract canvases move around
 and connect to each other to show one view then move and reconnect to each other showing a different painting/image. 
Seeing as many different combinations and views/perceptions as possible with the least amount of canvases.
(ie. Seeing 16 paintings within 4 canvases.)

 Since 1990 Herman has painted kinetic abstracts on flat canvases as well as 3-dimensional objects,
such as 12-inch spheres that electro-magnetically float and rotate 360 degrees under a custom built magnetic shelf.

 When a viewer looks to explore what is in a piece this is the same exploratory process the artist went through creating these pieces,
trying to "find themselves". It's not about "getting it," finding an artist's intent, which often leaves the viewer disconnected from the art.
The viewer trying to connect to the painting is the exploration that it chooses to express.
To explore the painting is the point, not figuring it out.
The Question is the Answer.  

The idea of viewing an object evolving, changing to a new position, changing views, amorphous,
attempts to take the viewer to a mental state of discovery.
A place where the viewer is looking for what the painting is "becoming", as it evolves.  

This is the same mental place as when Herman creates each piece, having no idea what it is to become until it nears completion.
The creation process of discovery by the artist is the place where artist and viewer can become one.
Allowing the journey to be the experience, and the evolving, living, changing of form the place where artist and viewer share one mind (zen)...
where the artist and viewer are an equal & integral part of the art.  

The artist's intent is to enable the viewer to see his/her role in the piece by exploring the piece the viewer “experiences” its properties,
thereby becoming part of it.
The paintings seem to say that they desire to become, they want to release the energy they contain. 
Through movement the painting tries to express its desire for self-discovery and expression.
Its creation-energy seems to say it (you) will not be contained.

 That our most natural state is fluidity and transition.

"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am.
I know that I am not a category.
I am not a thing - a noun.  I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe".

                                            ---- Buckminster Fuller