Nancy HolzhauserPainting is the only way I know how to express the deep love I have for this earth. I feel more connected to the natural world than anything else. And I LOVE paint! I love to play with it and see what it does: I pour it, blow it around with a hairdryer, sculpt it with a palette knife, and push it around with a brush. It is such a sensual and freeing experience. I worked as a field ecologist, but have always drawn and painted.
When I retired in 2015, I looked forward to painting the rest of my life. Six months into retirement, I developed a painful eye condition and could not paint. It took me two years to recover physically and emotionally to where I could think about creating again. Gradually I started back, as an intuitive artist. I play, using colors that I feel in my body: expressing joy and freedom after a life of following suffocating rules that our culture dictates for women, especially one working in a traditionally male-dominated field.
I paint from the heart; as soon as my critical mind comes in, I walk away and breathe before I go back. That way I know I am painting from my truth. My paintings are about the energies I feel in nature, sensuality, joy, wonder, the marvels of geology, and magical spirits. Watercolor is a light and playful medium; I use it when I want to express the ethereal and spiritual quality of a landscape. Acrylic feels more solid to me; I use acrylic to paint the power of a landscape. The freedom of painting intuitively has done so much to bring me into wholeness and healing.
You can follow me on Instagram at @nancyholzhauser.
I am a painter in acrylics and a printmaker doing fine art silkscreen printing or serigraphs.
Acrylic allows me to apply paint directly, while serigraph printing is more a process of constructing a picture, building up layer by layer in opaque and transparent ink.
My art is a celebration of a moment of time in nature, how light creates a mood and illuminates the shapes and colors. I am drawn to the complexity of textures and the subtleties of pattern in a landscape. I paint fairly impressionistic though I lean towards realism in style. I strive more to express the feeling I experienced and hopefully convey that to the viewer .
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio where I studied art and design at Cooper School of Art. After graduating from art school I worked as a graphic artist, taught art and design at both Cooper School of Art and California State University, Long Beach. While working as a graphic artist I was introduced to commercial silkscreen printing and after starting my own business I began to explore silkscreen printing as a fine art medium. I have worked as a serigraph artist for over 30 years. In recent years I have also returned to painting, this time in acrylics for greater freedom of expression. You can follow me on Instagram at @alanwork.
A serigraph is a fine art application of silkscreen printing. I don’t make a picture in another media and copy it as a reproduction print. Rather, my prints are originals that only exist once the printing process is complete. Working from sketches and color roughs I devise a design in outline form and using that as a basis, paint with ink the shape of each color to be printed on a separate clear acetate film. I transfer these images onto individual silkscreens and hand print each color onto archival paper, building up layer by layer to the finished design. Most of my prints employ 10 to 20 layers but some prints have as many as 40 or more layers. All my serigraphs are in limited editions.