This guest post by Bill Sasser was originally published in Raw Vision #115 and on billsasser.com. Posted here with permission.
“Have you ever seen a whale?” Herbert Kearney asks perched on a stool in his huge post-industrial art space, just downriver from New Orleans’s French Quarter. “I’ve seen a whale, a big whale, off Alaska. Seeing it you realize we aren’t alone in the universe, big monster fins are skimming under the surface. That big eye looking back at you, it’s the biggest soul in the world. They’re beautiful creatures.”
Just sitting still, Kearney emanates a halo of manic energy. Hennaed hair twisted back in a bun, he wears a wool coat, hat, and gloves—February 2005 is cold and the old hosiery mill is unheated.
A sculptor, painter, and poet who had spent a decade and a half traveling the world, he had arrived two years earlier and found a permanent spiritual home, in a port city where the creative slipstream welcomes newcomers, and art lives in the streets.