About

How do you validate the lofty title of “master?” What makes one artist a master while another deserves the title of merely being “talented?” For Bud Holman, the proof lies in examining not only the originality and flair of his unique style but showing how he tapped and ultimately transformed those inspirational sources in creating his own brand of lyrical expressionist landscape painting.

Understanding the authenticity of Holman’s art begins with the simple edict by which he has lived and painted: “Know thyself.” Fulfilling that mandate was particularly difficult in New York during the post-war years when Abstract Expressionism had exploded on the scene. Holman found many colleagues throughout this diverse avant-garde period, but he followed a different path than his closest artists — Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Alfred Jensen among them.

“This story reveals the life and works of a reclusive and prolific master. In his mature body of works one delights in discovering a voice that is truly original — and distinctly American — in the history of contemporary landscape painting.” Peter Hastings Falk

Holman stands out as an expressionist who captured in his landscapes the rhythms of nature. His canvases burst with the energy of color while his boldly brushed shapes maintained the vocabulary of earth, trees, and sky — all merging together like the monumental and layered façades of a great Italian cathedral or a Medieval tapestry. He would never follow the easy path of realism commonly found in contemporary art of the West. Instead, Holman asserts the mountains and hillsides for the leading role in his landscapes. The energy he finds in their great mass is reflected by a myriad of colors applied with bravura brushwork — sparks of oranges and reds recalling the drama of the Fauves, the eye finding relief in the high horizon bands that crown his landscapes like a pressure valve, releasing us to the sky.

“Painting is my way of life,” he says. “I, too, would like to be found at the end of my life in my unfinished garden, in the midst of one last painting.”

For more than seven decades, Bud Holman has created a deeply felt body of work that explores and maps the landscape of the human spirit. Imagine if you will the life of one man told through the strokes and textures of paint, densely layered, streaming across miles of canvas. Each morning, he rises with the desert sun and with paint brush in hand, begins the ritual of dancing the world into being.

Cradled along the southernmost border of the United States, Holman’s studio is just a stone’s throw from the vertical beams that soar 18 to 20 feet high and define the landscape for as far as the eye can see. Although his work is not political by nature, the presence of the steel barrier that separates Mexico and the United States pervades his latest works in the strong perpendicular slashes that advance across the horizon. The barrier echoes the rock formations that jut from the desert valley and define the tortured landscape.

“Working in pentimento, earlier images, forms, and strokes emerge from beneath new layers reminding us of their presence. Surfaces are so vast, so deep, the viewer is commanded to take a closer look. Simultaneous nearness and farness are conveyed in the very texture of the paint itself.” Connie Gibbons

Holman is first and foremost a colorist with an unflinching eye for the nuances of reflected light. His palette belies what we think we may know of the desert’s barrenness. From his earliest days in Topeka, Kansas, to his most recent paintings, his connection to the land has been unassailable. For Holman, the landscape encompasses many things: the physical features of a place, the quality and character of light, the peoples, traditions, stories, and cultures that exist there.

Holman’s paintings form a narrative arc of a ninety-year journey that started in Topeka, Kansas, and remains true throughout his career as a painter. In The Way to Ithaka, 2005–15, Holman references the ten-year voyage of Ulysses to find his way home. For Holman, his way to Ithaka is mapped in his paintings — through his landscapes we experience the story of his life.

Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1926, Bud Holman was from a family of abolitionist Presbyterian ministers. Growing up during the Great Depression, Holman lived simply, attending a one-room schoolhouse. He packed himself a sandwich in the mornings, saddled his horse, and spent his days riding across open land. His resourcefulness, imagination, and closeness to the earth during these formative years became his touchstones as an artist.

There is a tactile quality to Holman’s painting that sets the mood. He applies paint with aggression, creating multiple layers. Because the paint is applied thickly, Holman must allow it to dry for several days before applying the next layer, so he works on several paintings at a time — what he refers to as a “pentimento” style, with underlying traces of past paintings barely visible beneath the surface.

“At the heart of Holman’s work is reverence for the desert in all its atmospheric moments.” Roberta Franzheim

“Painting is my way of life,” Holman says. “I, too, would like to be found at the end of my life in my unfinished garden, in the midst of one last painting…”