Art Holman, a painter who has lived in San Geronimo Valley for decades, wasn’t sure he would make it to the opening of his exhibit at Toby’s Gallery last Saturday. He was in the hospital just a few weeks ago, and is fighting pneumonia with one lung. But he wanted to appear at the showing of his paintings of outer space, many of which took months to complete as he applied layers and layers of short brushstrokes of rich oil paint.
“I hoped to make it. I didn’t know,” he said the day after the reception, which he did attend. He was back at his Forest Knolls home, the walls of which are covered in his art: massive landscapes mounted in his living room, miniatures covering his library, swirling clouds and light blue sky forming his bedroom ceiling.
Mr. Holman—a tall man with scraggly gray hair who moves and speaks a bit more slowly, but with no lack of conviction, at 88 years old—is known as a landscape artist. But a spiritual awakening in Egypt in the 1980s drove him to take up the kinds of paintings on display at Toby’s. The canvases, some nearly six feet tall, depict the cosmos based on pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, such as of nebulas and stars. It’s his fourth showing of the outer space pieces, and probably the last while he is alive, he said.
“I think he’s channeling a powerful energy. But he has the background in form to balance it,” said Connie Smith-Seagull, a friend, neighbor and fellow painter with whom Mr. Holman trades critiques of pieces in process.
Mr. Holman was born in 1926 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and grew up in Chicago. He’s painted since he was 13. He used to put on puppet shows in his basement, and painted sets for them. But eventually, lacking much of an audience, he gave up the puppets and focused on the painting. (He was originally interested in surrealism, he said.)
He enrolled at the University of Illinois before serving in the army during World
War II. He was stationed in the United States, serving in Texas and Colorado. When the war ended, he enrolled at the University of New Mexico, earning a degree in fine arts.
The summer after graduation, in 1951, he spent a summer studying with Hans Hofmann, a famed abstract expressionist painter from Germany. Mr. Hofmann, who critiqued his work on a conceptual level, had a thick accent, so a buddy of Mr. Holman’s translated the lessons from “English to English.”
It was a formative experience for Mr. Holman, and his teacher encouraged him to pursue his art—though not without some advice. “Hofmann loved my painting and hated my drawing,” Mr. Holman said.
He ventured to San Francisco soon after, attending another art school in the city to make contacts. During the ’50s, he drew figures from models and began painting landscapes. But he also pursued color field; he says he helped invent it, in fact. It was an emerging school of abstract art in which planes or geometric shapes of color are the focus, and many artists eschewed the texture of brushstrokes in favor of flatter stains.
That decade he also said he discovered a grid, which he uses to this day on all of his large canvases. He was living in the city with some painter friends who would study a painting each day. One day, they studied a painting by Titian, a sixteenth-century Italian artist.
“One day I yelled, Eureka! I found the grid. Titian’s grid,” he said. “Ever since I put a grid down. Each landmark on the painting falls on the grid,” providing order and cohesiveness to the work.
In the late 1950s, he and two other artists were featured in a widely reviewed show, called “A Discovery Exhibition.” One reviewer, who referred to Mr. Holman as the star of the show, described the exhibit as “on the outer edge of the avant-garde,” and wrote, “The uninitiated, who may be shocked, should ask for guidance from the enthusiastic director.”
(At the time, Mr. Holman said that his primary influences were Piet Mondrian and Monet.)
But Mr. Holman eventually abandoned color field. “It wasn’t enough,” he said. “I had to exclude too much. I was left with the essence, but I wanted to get it a different way.”
The San Geronimo Valley, where he has lived for almost 50 years, provided ample inspiration for a career devoted to landscapes. For decades he took a walk each Sunday, but he didn’t paint outside; instead, he pulled from his memory. He painted one massive canvas, he said, after “seeing a dark canyon with one spot of light hitting it, which inspired me.”
His landscapes are not quite abstract—you can just make out a tree, a field, a pond—but presenting the scene properly is not the point. It’s about capturing a feeling and experience, particularly a spiritual experience, of the landscape.
At the reception on Saturday, Ms. Seagull-Smith flipped through a binder of old reviews and announcements for gallery and museum openings Mr. Holman has collected. “You can see it comes from seeing a tree, but it’s the energy inside it,” she said of one painting referenced in the binder. “They feel like the land and nature, but they’re not necessarily representational.”
Mr. Holman’s visit to Egypt in the ’80s propelled him to paint the stratosphere. He got “tuned in,” he said: In the town of Edfu, he had a past-life experience of being a priest in a Ptlolmeic temple, 5,000 years ago.
It’s not that the experience radically transformed his technique. In both his landscape and his outer space paintings, Mr. Holman’s style leaps out of the canvas in similar ways: the brushstrokes of color layered with oil paint and glazes, creating swirls of movement and fields of light.
Yet outer space is different, he says. The stars, he explains, help anchor parts of the canvas that once troubled him. But it’s not just about form. Representing spiritual experiences in general, and his own personal spiritual transformation, is extremely difficult in painting, he said. A few greats, like the sixteenth-century Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel, have done it, but for Mr. Holman, outer space provided a fresh, otherworldly way to explore and convey a spiritual effect.
“It was a way of expressing how I felt about life that was personal. I couldn’t find a way prior to outer space… Landscapes have been painted thousands of years, but outer space was fresh and new,” he said.
Given how many days, months and years Mr. Holman has devoted to painting, it’s perhaps not surprising that eventually he would seek something beyond this world to access the spiritual realm. In fact, he has not had an outside job since the 1950s, when he worked at a bookstore in San Francisco. Since then, he’s made his living entirely by painting.
(It hasn’t always been easy, and has barely scraped by at times, he said. One piece, for instance, he spent six months and five days working on. He priced it at $4,000—you can only charge so much.)
Perhaps one or two days of the year, he says, he decides he can’t access his subconscious, throws down the brush and quits. Otherwise, he paints every day.
The scenes that now serve as his inspiration are thousands of light years away, rather than just outside his door. Many of the nebulas he paints were known well before before the Hubble; but unlike land-based telescopes, the Hubble orbits the earth, above the atmosphere.
“It gets fabulous pictures…because it’s outside the atmosphere of the earth,” which distorts the light coming in from afar, Mr. Holman said.
The images captured by the Hubble are beautiful, and incredibly clear and precise. Like landscapes, they can awe us, even without the artist’s interpretation. Looking at them can even feel overwhelming. Mr. Holman’s vision of outer space brings galaxies into our realm, with shifting areas of light and dark cohering on the canvases, perhaps letting us know that there is a bit of order—like the hidden grids beneath his paintings—to the universe.