Bea 2018

I started teaching at Anderson Ranch in Snowmas Colorado in 1988 when I was 37. I gew to love  teaching and have always considered it an important part of my development as an artist and as a person.  In one of my first classes at Andrson Ranch there was a woman in her 60's, which to me seemed very old at the time.  She was a delightful person, and still is, except that now, 4 workshops later, she is 93.  Still delightful, full of anger over the present political situation,and still very much invloded with making art, her friends, and her family. Over the 38 years since then, I have ended up teaching a number of woman who were significantly older than me.They have been guiding lights in terms of my own aging, giving me a clear road map to follow as I go down the slippery slope of getting older. And also guiding lights in terms of  being the kind of person I want to be as I age.  No excuses, no regrets, no looking back to an earlier time when bending over to pick something up was not a big deal--and all mad as hell at where we are as a country right now.

Two Swans 2025

 My conundrum has always been how to make a beautiful abstract painting and then marry it with an image that will borth support the painting and at the same time say something. Lately, over the past few years, many of my images have been of animals, and the conundrum there is how to keep the images from being trite or sweet or both.  I found these two wooden swans at one of those places that is an "indoor flea market" in Asheville, North Carolina.  I real life I don't have much personal interaction with swans(living in the desert and what not)but I found these two to be quite compelling.  They were large, life sized, and altough realistic, you could still see signs of their wooden origins in the sometimes rough handling of the wood, or perhaps that was just life's wear and tear. The Swans will be exhibited in a large show of mine at Craig Krull Gallery, Witness from July 11-Aug. 29.  

Albuquerque Museum of Art, permanent collection

 

Recently, William Gassaway, Assistant Curator of Art at the Albuquerque Museum, notified me that two of my pieces were hanging in the permanent collection in the main gallery of the Museum.  The pieces had been donated by Fay Abrams in honor of her late husband, Jonathan Abrams, several years ago, so I was very pleased to have them up on display.  I wrote a blog about the pieces, Barefoot Riders, in 2022.  I hope you can get in to see them.  

Leaving 2026

Over the last two years, many of my images have involved splitting the figures in the frame. I am now asking the paint to play as vital a role in defining the finished image as the photo, or the parts of the collage that aren’t paint, like the eyes here, or the black cloud.  The painted part of the piece is telling a part of the story that is unfolding.  In this case, the story is about two people who are splitting up—a couple, friends, family, whenever two people who have been closely bonded break up—and the paint moves our eyes across the split, as well as the black paint flowing down the woman’s face, representing tears.  I see the figure on the left being female, and the figure on the right being male, and both are terribly sad.

Mouse House 2026

 

Recently my 5 year old grandson came to visit.  He spent much of the weekend outside, alone, constructing a fortress made from the dog's water bucket and all the loose bricks he could find in the yard. I told him there were mice inside--a family of five--and we proceeded to push food into the edifice so they could have something to eat. After he returned home, I asked Gemini to help me reconstruct the house with mice included.  I had never done any imaging with AI before, and I was absolutely floored at what it could do. That's pretty much what his building looked like, plus the mice.  I know everyone out there is thinking "Oh Holly Holly! where have you been??" but it is absolutely magical.  I tried Gemini on my desktop where my over 200,000 photos are stored, and got almost no results(this was done on my iPad). It kept suggesting I use Photoshop, so that put a kink in my creative flow since I work exclusively on my desktop. I don't know if this is something I can use as a tool with my work, or if it keeps me too much in my head, which is not where the magic happens.  I have made images with photoshop that were stand-alones, and I liked them, but they never had the power of the"handmade" pieces.  When I teach, I tell my students to listen to their hands, and leave their thoughts at the door.  So I'm not sure if this is just another fancier photoshop or if because of the ease and speed of it, perhaps it will open some new doors. stay tuned.

Hungry 2009

                                                                     Original 

Repainted top and bottom

 I made this image in 2009.  It was about hunger and not having enough to eat.  The man’s body refers to kwashiorkor “A severe protein malnutrition causing fluid retention(edema), a distended abdomen, lethargy, hair and skin changes and an enlarged liver”. His body is made from a photo of dried and cracked mud. The mouth on his legs, along with the apple on this knee, all speak to-this hunger. The top and bottom borders I made using the inside of a security envelope for its beautiful blue pattern.  You can imagine my surprise when, recently I went to pull "Hunger" out of my storage for an exhibit in San Diego and found that the entire bottom and top blue borders had gone completely white, faded to nothing. Fortunately for me. I have a very talented and capable  husband, who when asked if he could fix the problem of the white borders,said, "Sure, no problem", and he did, painting in the top and bottom in a beautiful system of alternating marks.  He said he loved doing it, and wanted to be my studio assistant, although he is an artist in his own right so I doubt that will happen anytime soon: Robert Wilson Art (Link to his website).

Crow with Spots 2025

One of the things I teach when I do mixed media workshops is how to do transfers--meaning taking  something from one place--a photo, paint, graphite, marker, text, magazine images--and transferring it to another surface.  Over the years, mostly serendipitously,  I've learned many ways to do these transfers. When I first started doing transfers it was possible to take an inkjet transparency, print it out in your ink jet printer, apply a little polymer medium, smack it down on your substrate, and viola--it transferred. However, in this time of rapidly changing everything, it stopped working.  The formula changed, and we had to go to laser printers to do our very difficult, fingerprint removing process of doing a transfer.  Things changed again, other ways to do transfers developed, and as soon as I would teach one class a transfer process, the materials would disappear or nothing would work quite right.  Mostly recently I discovered, by accident, that Hammermill made a lovely double sided glossy paper for laser printers, and these prints transferred like a house afire.  It was quite wonderful, but short lived. When I went to Amazon to order the paper, it turned out that now you could only order 2400 sheets at a time if you wanted that specific paper. I ended up ordering a strange Koala Pearl glossy paper, and that's what I did Crow with Spots with.