Oceanside library features pop art exhibit

The Oceanside Public Library is displaying the work of a local Oceanside resident and former professional photographer through the month of August.

Jeff Herzlich, who has had his work exhibited at the library four times previously, focused his latest works on movie legends like Brad Pitt, Henry Fonda and Marilyn Monroe.

“They are photographs of moments in movies that were transformed into drawings and later painted for a pop art type of feel,” Herzlich explained. “I chose moments in movies that I thought the actors were the most photogenic and at their most revealing. Whatever hit a note in me.”

A chiropractor by day, Herzlich continues to work his photography, which he considers as more than a hobby, in his free time. He got the idea for this current project, he said, from a mixture of his own past works as well as other artists.

“I was doing drawings of landscapes and then painting them in and I thought I could extend that to the personalities in the movies. This was something I was playing around with and they wanted another show from me, so I figured I’d enlarge the body of work,” Herzlich said. “I was also looking at other works, by Andy Warhol and contemporaries in pop art.”

Eleanor Mahoney, the program director at the library, said that each of Herzlich’s exhibits is different from the other.

“One time had these incredible photographs of Italy. Another times he had ones involving nature,” Mahoney said. “This time, it’s very modern. It’s visually interesting in that there’s a tremendous contrast between the figures, the individuals and the color selections that he’s used. We’re thrilled with it.”

Herzlich was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York though he ended up studying photography in the late sixties at the Brooks Institute in California, which he said was one of the best photography schools at the time.

Though Herzlich opened a studio in New York, he decided that he wasn’t making enough to pay the bills, and so he went to school to study chiropractics. He never gave up on photography, however.

“I always maintain my photography,” Herzlich said.