The Studio

The hacienda announces itself in terracotta red adobe against the desert sky of Nogales. Holman designed the building himself, wrapping it around a central courtyard garden that he planned and tended personally — planting, pruning, and watching the hummingbirds from the portico.

“One side of the portico opens on to the courtyard. Bud spends quite a bit of time on the patio watching the hummingbirds and listening to the desert sounds.”

The viewInput from the studio across the border into Mexico — the colored hills of the Sonoran desert rolling south — was the primary inspiration for the final decades of his work.

The front door opens into a foyer layered with tiger rugs on the floor, Holman’s paintings covering every wall, and Pre-Columbian figures on the tables and mantle. The effect is immediate and total — you are inside a world entirely of his making.

“The foyer has several tiger rugs on the floor and Bud’s paintings on the walls along with a fair amount of Pre-Columbian statues on the tables and mantle.”

The Pre-Columbian collection, assembled over decades of travel through Mexico and Central America, sits alongside work from every period of his career — early New York canvases next to late Nogales paintings.

Every room in the hacienda doubles as a gallery. The dining room is hung floor-to-ceiling with Holman’s favorite works, layered Zapotec and Persian rugs covering the floor beneath heavy wooden furniture. Two libraries on either side of the main hallway hold his collection of books on classical architecture and art history.

“The master bedroom is large enough to serve as a gallery on its own. Decorated with folk art from New Mexico along with Bud’s paintings.”

The distinction between living space and gallery simply doesn’t exist here. Art is the architecture, the furniture, the floor, the walls. The hacienda is the most complete expression of how Holman thought about the relationship between a life and a body of work.

The largest room in the hacienda is the one Holman designed specifically for painting. Wood plank walls allow for the constant reordering of works — paintings hung, removed, replaced, reconsidered. Large sofas allow for long periods of looking. He painted here every day.

“The largest room is the gallery with wood plank walls which allow for constant reordering of the art work. This is where Bud paints every day.”

Because his pentimento method requires paint to dry between layers, he always worked on multiple canvases simultaneously — sometimes eight or ten paintings in progress at once, lined up along the walls in various states of completion.