Alive
With Possibilities
Abstract
Geometric Paintings by Holly Van Hart at SLAC Building 52
SLAC
National Accelerator Laboratory is proud to announce an exhibit of paintings by
the acclaimed Peninsula artist, Holly Van Hart. Alive with Possibilities, features eleven geometric abstractions in
oil on canvas—with additional elements mixed into the pigment—that communicate
the artist’s optimism about the creative life—in art, but also in other areas.
Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are known for technological ingenuity, of
course, and Van Hart, who became a painter after having worked for a long time in
tech, embraces a wider definition that includes even traditional media.
Van
Hart’s materials and methods, however, are by no means confined to oil paint.
She also employs acrylic paint, and, mixed in, and lending texture (and a regionally
appropriate conceptual context), silica wafers and silica sand. (Art aficionados may remember that the Cubists
of a century ago, Picasso and Georges Braque, added sand to their paintings in
order to emphasize the tactility and materiality of these aesthetic objects
that had jettisoned traditional illusionism.) Van Hart in the past explored a
personal symbolism of birds’ nests, eggs, interwoven ribbons, and circles, all
painted realistically, although the ensembles and implicit narratives were
invented. In a 2014 article on that work, I wrote:
…[The paintings] are … both representational and
abstract; and they express—well, let Georgia O’Keefe say it, succinctly: “I
found that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for.” Van
Hart’s paintings, Romantic/expressionist depictions of birds’ nests enclosing
eggs, are clearly symbolic, and thus out of step with … contemporary fashion…
Van Hart’s [exploration of metamorphosis and
growth] derives in part from her long, successful career in industrial
engineering and operations research in Silicon Valley, a locus of “creativity
and unrelenting optimism[, and] … a place where anything is possible.” … These works about potential and
metamorphosis, then, are clearly autobiographical, but they’re also universal
(as the deepest, most personal work often is, paradoxically)…. Van Hart
writes, “Each painting is a
journey, requiring many layers of oil paint, and much inspection and
introspection over a period of months.”
[The Stanford painter] Nathan Oliveira … reminisced about studying in 1950 with
one of his idols, the German expressionist Max Beckmann. The older painter’s
English was rudimentary, so he advised the young Californian through his
English-speaking wife: a painting life, he warned, probably with perverse
pride, was “Sweat, much sweat.”
In
this series, the artist employs simplified, geometric forms that clearly derive
from the organic, natural motifs in the earlier realistic works. They also
share the sense of discovery that inspired modernist artists, who saw in modern
technology’s machine forms —Léger famously admired the polished steel cylinders
of cannon barrels—the potential for a new humanity informed by scientific
rationalism. They explored a vocabulary of elemental forms that would be transcultural
and universally comprehensible — a visual Esperanto based on Cézanne’s famous cubes,
cylinders and spheres. But while Van Hart shares simplified forms with Léger,
Mondrian and others, her colorful exuberance suggests growth and metamorphosis
rather than straitlaced, sober common sense. The dynamic, dancing shapes and
carefully harmonized palettes in “Flourishing,” “Great Expectations,” “Intertwined”
and “Life’s Twists” suggest contemprary versions of the vibrant, vital flower
paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Van Hart: “The world [including Silicon
Valley] … is alive with possibilities.”
