Artist Biography

Max J. Herbert (www.MaxJHerbertArt.com) works in mixed media including acrylic paints, paper, plastic, metal, found objects, and natural objects; as well as a three-dimensional fabric technique she developed in her teens. Self-taught, she has lived creatively from a very early age, often escaping into the visual arts as well as writing. However, she took a long break from visual art – from her late twenties to her early forties. In 2015 she picked up a paintbrush again and has been painting diligently ever since.

Born in Marietta, GA, but having moved often, Max now resides in Lexington, KY, the town she’s always thought of as “home.” During her time living in the Hickory, NC area, she was a regular vendor at the Hickory Farmers Market and attended many state and local events where she sold prints of her work as well as the occasional original. She now sells her work on the internet via her website.

In 2017, the artist’s portrait of David Bowie entitled All the World Under His Heels accompanied the North Carolina Literary Review article “Make Believe with Utter Conviction: An Interview with Garth Risk Hallberg” by Brian Glover. She also won an honorable mention for her painting of a vintage radio in a group exhibition entitled Connections, at Full Circle Arts in Hickory, NC. Her work is included in numerous private collections in the U.S.

Much of Max’s work reflects a sense of connectivity and equality within the universe. This is particularly evident in her “We Are Star Stuff” series, inspired by her love of science, science fiction, and space. Channeling Carl Sagan via his quote, “We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” Max floats nude torsos over colorful space nebulae to create “constellations” that are both detailed and, due to their facelessness, anonymous. The beauty of the figure is heightened by the underlying message that we are all connected and equal within the universe.

She currently has two series which evoke a sense of nostalgia and longing for the past: her “Vintage Objects” series, each piece featuring one centrally-placed vintage object painted in a realistic style, and her “Golden Age Sci-fi” series, in which she uses pages from vintage pulp science fiction novels as the canvas for paintings rockets, flying saucers, and alien planets.

Some of the artist’s other themes include the beauty in the broken and imperfect, and the masks behind which we hide. “I aspire to capture the cracks in our masks through which our true faces gleam, the chinks in our armor that reveal our weaknesses, and the raw emotions that accompany our failures.”