oldswimmer
oldswimmer
| Forum role | Member since | Last activity | Topics created | Replies created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member | Jul 23, 2008 (17 years) |
- | 3 | 4 |
- Forum role
- Member
- Member since
Jul 23, 2008 (17 years)
- Last activity
- -
- Topics created
- 3
- Replies created
- 4
Bio
It is late February 2023
Susan G Holland Art Studio is about ready for its move to
the state of Washington on March 3rd, 2023. My new location
will be in Seattle, at 13000 Linden Ave N. # 401. My cell phone number will remain the same, and my email will continue to be susangholland@gmail.com.
It is April 2022. Wildfires are sweeping through this desert in NE New Mexico. We have been prepared to evacuate for weeks. The wind keeps shifting making firefighting extremely difficult in the mountains and canyons . This to will pass. Or so we tell ourselves.
Among the endangered buildings here a few miles from Las Vegas NM is the summerhouse up on the mesa north of the farm. I have about seventy original paintings exhibited there. People like us have had to face terrible fire losses of whole homes and barns and animal pastures quite nearby. I keep reminding myself "Nothing is forever.".
Meanwhile i am still trying to simplify my online presence. Too many websites to keep track of, and at this time, at 84, I am trying to print out my better internet offerings. Someone may want to look at them in the loose leaf note-book I am putting together. I've taken some notebooks over to a safer place in Santa Fe.
What a year it has been! We are still on tenterhooks about not only the political future of the USA but also the fate ahead for our whole planet. I think we are finally realizing, here on earth, that MORE MORE MORE is not good for any creature. We silly creatures dig ourselves into terrible pits thinking that MORE is better. It seems to be killing us increasingly fast, with Covid still untamed, and the divide within the many human factions seemingly irreversible.
Sad. Chaos is still the theme in my art and writing. Carving has recently become more infrequent. Painting happens in fits and starts...sometimes it just stops!!
A visit to my Seattle/Puget Sound children and their children was made difficult, even though we did get my eldest grandson married. A dear friend of the family died. Everything sort of stopped. My partner and I did take a lovely few days to explore Orcas Island. It's hard to get back to normal after trips like that.
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2020
As intensely curious as always, my status has changed, but my goals have not. Now I am living on a ranch in New Mexico with a beloved old friend from high school days. The wide open spaces, thin air, dry conditions, all the hugeness of the sky and landscape are mine to see and paint about.
Today is the 30th of October 2020, and we are in the midst of not only a crucial election season, but also in the crunch of the Covid-19 scourge, a pandemic that is changing the whole world. I am so grateful for my studio at the corner of the rambling ranch house, and for the sunshine gleaming on, today, the remains of a big snow that took us into the single digits. I still did feed the one barn cat left after an invasion of hungry coyotes who about cleaned out our cat population. This is a new kind of "rough" for me. It does come with the territory.
I am busy with watercolors, oils, and wood. We are currently inventing a gallery space in a nice large building up on the mesa. The gallery will not have the traditional grand opening because of the masked cautionary lifestyle that COVID-19 requires. We will have carefully planned viewings by appointment, and, necessarily, a serious web presence. You will read about the progress at this site.
(Below: my status as of 2016... four years ago.)
Half rooted in the green hills of eastern Pennsylvania (not far from Wyeth country) and half rooted in my current location east of Lake Washington near Seattle WA, I am a creature of my adventures in both places and in between. Like many artists, where I have been is marked inevitably on what I make.
Visceral is a good word.. my art has always come from the inside of me, except perhaps at Temple U's Tyler School of Art where I was trained in skills I had never met, and made the better by the multiple disciplines and training of the eye. Still, what I painted on the outside of the large portfolio I carried back and forth with me, were visceral outpourings collected over my years at Tyler. The spirit reigns.
My marks are my own, and I suppose I like them as often as I like myself. Usually I like myself okay and sometimes quite a lot. I do know that when I am feeling passion inside I can make a pretty passionate painting.
My wood art is an organic extension of my marks in two-dimensional works, and my paintings and also the digital "spin-offs" I make of them, move naturally back into my carving in color and line and texture. My studio 2-D and 3-D work comes only in "original."
I recently said goodbye to some wonderful years of living near and then IN a rain forest in the Olympic Mountain Range of Washington State..remote enough that you could go out with nothing on if you wanted and no one but the bears and deer would see you!
I have three grown kids, and five grandchildren ranging, all creative and dear, and all in touch. What wealth! They are in Washington State.
In 2015 I was hired to participate in a special project: The McMenamin's Hotel complex in Bothell WA hired me to add my work to the varied and entertaining collection they love to put on their walls. The opening was October 2015.
Currently my work is mostly on portraits of people close to me, and a series of abstracts in oil on panel or canvas supports. [as of Feb 2016]
This site will chronicle the rich array of activities that reflect my deep interests. As years go by, the focus narrows and extraneous "fluff" is left behind. The Muse insists! (More "fluff" occurs, yes...but the Muse insists about that too.)
I also write essays, stories, and such on a site called The Story Hall at URL: https://medium.com/@susangholland_41327/
Art-making began in childhood, persisted through College, Tyler School of Fine Art, and on through my seven some decades, and I suppose into some future years!
I am a believer. My life changed in 1963.
"He made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." II Cor. 5:21
But that does not make me think I can tell you what to believe. Only God can do that.
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