Albert Guidry, the webmaster of this site had asked me to write a piece for the Hensche Foundation quite a while back. I started several times, but I was so intimidated by the task that I just never finished it. There has been so much written about Henry and the whole color trip that I just didn’t feel like I had anything new to add. Recently however, dear Al threatened to take me off the website if I didn’t comply.

     What follows is a humble appraisal of what Henry, the artist, means to me. I believe that a reverent love of nature is the foundation for Henry’s technical virtuosity and supplied him with the fortitude to hold on to his vision in the face of the many “isms” that distracted lesser painters throughout this century.

     Henry was, to me, essentially a spiritual painter. And by that I mean that at his finest, his paintings provide an entrance point to a deep experience of the universe. Of reality. Beauty takes us to this place--a plateau of awareness unencumbered by ideologies or systems of thought

     Jiddu Krishnamurti called it “choiceless awareness”. This striking at the truth requires true love. For Henry, it is the love of light, and the color it creates in joint venture with our eyes. Henry said, “To write a love song you have to be in love.” The experience comes first--the painting is a record of having had that experience. Or to quote that renegade Henshe-ite from the deep South, Tommy Thurmond, “You ARE the tree!”

     “Paintings are to teach man to see the glory of human visual existence”. So Henry told Robert Brown in a 1971 interview for the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art.

     This is a philosophical stance that places high value on our human experience. Henry is asserting the majesty of our human experience and it’s spiritual nature. I remember he told a group of us once that we didn’t deserve the paradise of heaven if we couldn’t appreciate the beauty that was all around us, right here on Earth.

     Henry was fond of quoting Joseph Conrad’s preface from “Niger of the ‘Narcissus’” as an eloquent definition of art. He found within it his own life’s mission:

     “ Art may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential--their one illuminating and convincing quality--the very truth of their existence.

     “…To arrest for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile--such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished--behold!--all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile--and the return to an eternal rest.” (from the New Review, December, 1897)

John Ebersberger, Annapolis, MD