Lowell Herrero
Illustrated by Lowell Herrero
by Kate Rothrock
Foreword by Jennifer Garden, Curator, Napa Valley Museum of Art
September 2007 Release
$65 | $85 CDN
12 x 12½
224 pages
Hardcover, jacketed
Over 90 full color paintings
ISBN-10:086713-096-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-86713-096-6
UPC 7-66710-83096-1 No. 83096 Art

About the Book
Throughout a dynamic life that has spanned the Great Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Silicone Valley, and the dawn of the 21st century, Lowell Herrero has turned his passion for living into art. He traveled from his early home in Oakland California to Tuscany, Provence, and Spain where he absorbed the profound lessons of their sensuous landscapes. The colors of horizons and rich earth, the sensations of sunlight, and the fragrance of flower-filled fields co-mingled in his imagination and flowed through his paint brush on to his canvases.

The work reproduced in these pages celebrates his lifelong enchantment with nature's beauty and fecundity and the deep human connection to it. Herrero's decade-long love affair with the Napa Valley has been the immediate inspiration for his earthy paintings. Yet, these are imaginary landscapes created in his mind's eye from a life of keen observation and experience.

Herrero delights in farmers engaged in varieties of agricultural labor. He renders them bursting with life, over-large, and content— extensions of the very soil they cultivate. Vineyards stretch into the distance as grape pickers enjoy lunch under a cloudless blue sky. Lavender harvesters bend to their task, and a field of rolled bales tells us the hard work of haying is at an end. Each painting invites us to smile with pleasure and enjoy the inner vitality and plentitude of the landscape.

Lowell Herrero presents ninety paintings completed since the 1990s and published on the occasion of his one-man exhibition at the Napa Valley Museum in Yountville, California. This volume offers readers a chance to become better acquainted with the artist through an in-depth interview and an essay on the origins and development of Herrero's extensive body of work.

For many years, Herrero maintained a highly successful career as a commercial designer and illustrator, stealing time from his pressing work schedule to spend hours at the easel. Eventually, his desire to paint full time prevailed, and in 1982 he gave up advertising to devote himself to his canvases. You can recognize Herrero's commercial experience in his brilliant handling of intense colors and his serene, balanced compositions. In more recent paintings, the smoother surfaces of the commercial art style give way to a dotted, almost pointillist technique that adds excitement to his lush fields of vegetation. But above all, Herrero's paintings project the irrepressible joie de vivre of an artist who knows how to live.

About the Artist
Lowell Herrero (b 1921) has enjoyed a long and varied career in art. After formal art education at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, he immediately embarked on a very successful career in advertising illustration and design. He started at the bottom, as part of a large studio, and worked to the top, owning his own graphic design agency. National clients and awards made the agency highly recognizable and profitable, but the three partners, all artists, each yearned to be free of the corporate life. They dissolved their business and Herrero began the second half of his life in art. He started to paint to please himself!

In 1993, Herrero moved into a new studio on Mount Saint Helena, in the Napa Valley. The location and size of the studio greatly influenced his images, gave him compelling new subject matter and allowed him to paint in a large format. In 2001, he settled permanently in the Napa Valley, where he lives with his wife, Janet, in a Tuscan farmhouse of his own design. He spends each day in the studio painting the beautiful landscapes of his imagination.