Harry Holland (artist)

Harry Holland
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Born	(1941-04-11) April 11, 1941
Nationality	British
Citizenship	United States
Occupation	Artist

Wright Henry Holland (born 11 April 1941) is a British artist, known internationally for his figurative work, held in both private and public collections. He has been based in Cardiff, Wales, since 1973.

Life and career

Harry Holland was born in Glasgow to Joseph Holland and Joan Holland (née Goddard). He spent his childhood in various parts of the UK before settling with his mother, stepfather and brother in London in 1951. He was educated at Rutlish Grammar School, Merton and, while not academically-minded as a youngster, his natural propensity for drawing was always evident. He was also a talented sprinter, representing his county in the 440 yards event. A brief time at Wimbledon School of Art was abandoned for financial reasons; then, from 1965-69, he studied at St. Martin’s School of Art Saint Martin's School of Art, where he exhibited at the graduation show in 1969.

Initially working mainly as a copyist and illustrator, Holland went on to teach at Coventry College of Art, also in Stourbridge and Hull, before moving to the Cardiff School of Art in 1973. By 1978, he was able to commit solely to painting, following the purchase of his work by the collector Charles Saatchi, with sales by the dealer Nicholas Treadwell further supporting his decision to leave teaching. Choosing to remain in Cardiff was in part due to his commitment to the establishment in 1974 of the Association of Artists and Designers in Wales (AADW), which, by the mid-1980s, counted several hundred members. Holland was its second chairman.

Holland was one of four "painters of promise for the 1980s" nominated by the Financial Times critic, William Packer, in a 1978 Vogue magazine article spotlighting a new generation, published as Packer was curating the British Art Show [1] which would open in 1979. Holland’s work was duly exhibited in that show in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bristol and Sheffield. A Welsh Art Council Touring Exhibition |date=1980 |publisher=Welsh Arts Council |location=Cardiff |isbn=0-905171-70-5}}</ref> In 1979, Holland also showed at the Roundhouse Gallery, London and at Oriel, the Welsh Arts Council gallery in Cardiff. These successes, in close proximity, helped establish him as a significant figure in British art.

The following year his work was shown in the Welsh Arts Council group exhibition, Probity in Art (selected by Patrick Dolan), which also toured in Spain. By the 1980s, his work was being exhibited in Brussels and New York, Paris and Heidelberg and 1988 saw the beginning of his association with the Thumb Gallery in London (later renamed the Jill George Gallery [2].

In April 1992, Holland’s was among the work that opened the new Martin Tinney Gallery [3] in Cardiff: he has shown there consistently ever since, thus maintaining a profile on home territory at the same time as establishing an international following thanks to exhibitions in America, regular shows at Brussels’s Mineta Move and Il Polittico in Rome and also at the Albemarle Gallery in London.

Style and influences

Holland's style is realist. His first awareness of what he refers to as the “paintability” of flesh came through the study of the work of Titian Titian and Velázquez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Velázquez and he acknowledges that he learned most from copying old masters. Holland's sense of connection with the past is often reflected in works which reference these artists, as in those where the device of the mirror is part of the structure of a composition and, at the same time, conscious homage.

A predominant interest in the formal and technical aspects of painting led Holland to adopt the time-honoured technique of building slowly from under-paintings, with overpainting and the layering of several glazes on top. Paint is applied thinly, using a very close range of tonal values, with no strong highlights or deep shadows, every aspect of the composition meticulously worked. Drawings are always the prelude to the painting, and David Lee judges these to be his “freest, most uninhibited and natural work”. Yet, however traditional Holland's approach, Edward Lucie-Smith Edward Lucie-Smith perceives his output as reflecting a wholly contemporary sensibility.

Some of the work of the 1970s fits into the category of photo-realism and a parallel has also been drawn with the work of Edward Hopper Edward Hopper, where an ostensibly narrative content is actually ambiguous, in no way fixed.

Yet William Packer suggested that to describe him baldly as photo-realist would be a little misleading. “As the imagery is appropriated by the painting, so it is restated in painterly terms, the modelling of the forms and the articulation of the pictorial space conforming to the older technical convention, the whole providing an ambiguous and poetic commentary on the nature of painting and the power of representation." Packer also sees time in his painting as "not at all the frozen moment of the snap-shot, but more ambiguously stable, paradoxically still and eternal, the action caught for ever at its most expressive, richly descriptive and full of possibility". His pictures have also been described as presenting themselves as “transcriptions from the visible world …reassuring, truthful, yet whose reality is not ours, but that of the artist".

Holland’s affinity with the art of the past is reflected both in his genres and in the themes to which he habitually returns: in particular the nude, still life and mythology. Classical allusions abound, “a mythological world transferred to the present".

Religious subjects also appear in his work, as in La Veronica (1999), also Samaritan (2002). But where, in previous centuries, the significance of the characters of Greek and Roman mythology, and those of Biblical stories, was readily understood, they are no longer familiar in the same way. In this respect, Holland’s referencing of such figures adds to the enigmatic element in his work. People appear to be depicted in ordinary situations, but the picture’s titles, for example Diana and Acteon, suggest something more complex at play, so that the viewer is invited into a deeper, more enquiring, engagement with what they see. Time frames slowly merge and matters at first seeming to relate specifically to the society of today are in fact those which have always concerned humanity.

Such allusions are not confined to human figures. A painting entitled Persephone, with the cardboard shape of a female torso, lain horizontal and draped with a cloth, seems to suggest nothing more or less than a coffin. With the knowledge that Persephone was the wife of Hades, with whom she ruled the underworld, comes a new perspective. Yet Holland’s way of incorporating and manipulating references across time means that the picture also references Man Ray’s photograph of the curved back of Lee Miller.

Women, mostly young, are Holland's predominant subject and Edward Lucie-Smith suggests that here are “meditations on the mystery of the female personality, rather than attempts to analyse it directly”. In this respect, Lucie-Smith also draws a parallel with Vermeer Johannes Vermeer and his depictions of women in the context of domestic life.

Holland admires the 19th-century salon painters, aspiring to the precision of the 19th century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau William-Adolphe Bouguereau, for whom classical ideals were the fundamental. In compositional terms, it is their balance and structure Holland emulates: the positioning of figures is plotted so that each relates to and is part of a whole, yet each figure, even while ceding to another, retains its own individuality.

An interest in political and social issues, in attitudes and prejudices, has also fed into Holland's painting. A picture of three men, entitled Steve Biko (1987), invokes a very significant point in the history of Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa in the 1970s, and the subsequent murder of Steve Biko Steve Biko in custody in 1977. The figures are neither literal, nor masquerading as characters in a documentary reconstruction, but acquaintances of the artist painted from life: it is the title, with its literal and metaphorical reference to skin, to injustice and to martyrdom, that gives the painting its further dimension. David Briers also points out that the overall composition is derived from Titian, by way of Manet, adding another evocative layer of signification.

Holland has also painted people and views of the vibrant multi-cultural community in Cardiff's old dockland where at one time he had his studio. These and pictures of other less salubrious areas of the city offer perspectives on urban life which are part documentary and part commentary.

Recognising the element of theatricality central to Holland’s work, Norbert Lynton suggested that reality is conveyed in pictorial dramas, dramas of which Holland is playwright, director and designer, with scripts nevertheless closer to epigrams than actual narrative. Questions are posed, no meaning imposed, the audience is left to decide, each for themselves. Some paintings are evidently conundra, a philosophical engagement with the nature of things, tensions undefined. Even if the work has an apparently unemotional objectivity, gradually as more questions are posed, the viewer becomes drawn more closely into the picture’s emotional imperative.

Holland's pictures are notable for their manipulation of pictorial space, which can give a dreamlike air. Tension is also created by the element of ambiguity: figures are depicted in contexts which are by their nature transitional, poised on staircases or landings, in doorways or portals. In these, it is never entirely clear whether people are making entrances or exits, or whose presence, arrival or departure might have created or altered the emotional dynamic. Such layers of possibilities and interpretations permit a gradually more complex view to evolve.

The play of metaphor forms the practical base for Holland's painting. Explaining his thinking, Holland has written: "The qualities of spaces, light and mood are achieved by using paint metaphorically, employing one fact to enlighten the viewer as to the nature of another kind of fact. Some metaphors are direct, as, for example, when translucent layers of paint can be made to have the translucent qualities of human skin. Some, however, are indirect, such as in the making of space. The conventions of linear and atmospheric perspective exemplify this". Holland’s purpose is to express aspects of the world most important to him, aspects which are by their nature complex and involve internal and external views as well as beliefs, ideas and feelings, often contradictory in character. He believes that every painting, to be authentic, must have more than one level of meaning and employ a number of different material effects. These effects are found in the nature of paint and are used to invent appearance.

Writing about Holland's 1990 Thumb Gallery show of Still Lifes (seen in Hamburg and Los Angeles before coming to London), Edward Lucie-Smith suggested that Holland’s control of his medium links him to the still lifes of the 17th century, including those of Chardin Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. He also likened the work to that of pittura metafisica Metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico three centuries later, noting too parallels with René Magritte https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › René_Magritte

and arte povera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arte_Povera. However, Lucie-Smith does not see the work as “metaphysical” pastiches, rather that “they acknowledge what has taken place in contemporary art during the 1970s and 1980s, and often offer an ironic commentary”.

For a time in the early 1990s, Holland created and set up what were effectively constructions or installations, rather than still lifes, which he then went on to paint. Stones, textiles, cardboard, wood: all record the substance of everyday lives but, at the same time, symbolism is clearly present, where inanimate objects reflect animate concerns. His occasional work in sculpture is indicative of his explorations into the basic nature of two- and three-dimensional media.

In 2000, Holland’s paintings were shown for the first time at Il Polittico, the Rome gallery dedicated to contemporary art, in a group exhibition along with work by Sean Henry and photography by Edward Lucie-Smith. The show’s title, Classicismi Metropolitani (Metropolitan Classicisms), encapsulated some of Lucie-Smith’s earlier observations on the artist. Solo shows at Il Polittico followed in 2002, 2005 and 2006, as well as various group shows, the strong relationship with this gallery underlining the Italians’ sympathy and affinity for work which enters into the realms of the mysterious and metaphysical, as first explored by di Chirico. Writing about the show Musica Silente (Silent Music), Alessandro Riva alludes to unspoken truths in the silences, the existential distress therein: “References are made to an enigma, but the solution is always deferred".

Especially in the later myth paintings, Holland has created studio setups which “refer to and explore metaphysical events but without the need for suspension of disbelief.” Implicit in all his work is Holland’s acceptance of the paradox of realist painting, namely that the picture is not reality, yet, in the fixing of the person on canvas, they can be more real than in life. Norbert Lynton has observed that Holland’s art “returns us, all the time, to the underlying functions of art, relying upon and the subverting the means by which presents and we read images. His avoidance of immediate shock makes the process all the more insidious. His planted references to the history of art makes all of it his accessory and alerts us to its own essential duplicities. Art has always been artifice, requiring, as Degas Edgar Degas said ‘as much cunning as the perpetration of a crime’.”

Holland himself has put it like this: “All art is artificial. Whatever the subject, or object, art is a way in which we see the world. Figurative painting is done using metaphors that reconstruct or re-imagine the things we see around us to explain, celebrate, reinforce or destroy assumptions in our lives. Nobody looking at a painting can be under the illusion that it was made by anything other than in an artificial way, so what it says about myths or non-physical circumstances, however credible it may seem, is open to analysis, indeed part of the enjoyment of painting is that very process of scrutiny.” It is Holland’s understanding of this that leads him to see it “as the most interesting part of making paintings”.

Personal life

Holland has been married since 1963 to Mo (Maureen Augusta), whom he credits with having persuaded him to return to art-school and pursue his career. They have two daughters.

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