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Exhibition: Out of Mind — Paintings by Eric Holzman

November 30, 2016 - January 31, 2017

Hudson Valley #1 by Eric Holzman

CRS announces Out of Mind, an exhibition of oil paintings by Eric Holzman. The exhibition will be on view from December 1, 2016 – January 31, 2017. We invite you to meet the artist at the CRS Holiday Party on Saturday, December 10 from 4 – 8 pm.

Eric has been a professional painter and art teacher since the 1970s. This is his second solo exhibition at CRS, his first coming in 2006. He is also now a student of A Course in Miracles and regularly drums for the monthly Healing Circles at CRS. We are pleased to be able to share his creative spirit with the CRS community more and more.

Eric Holzman always begins painting from life but brings the work back into the studio, accumulating density of paint, depth, presence, returning to many of the canvases again and again over a period of years. His landscapes share an atmospheric space that is deep, suggestive, sensual, and in tension with the surface, employing a relatively three-dimensional rendering of form in space, relative to most modernism. Often, the bottoms of the canvases support a lot of weight. The landscapes evoke a moment of in time, when the play of light on leaf is just so, and yet their weightiness imparts a sense of the ancient or timeless, echoing T.S. Eliot:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
— section two, stanza three of “Burnt Norton” from Four Quartets

The human figures in his landscapes are both obscured and revealed, allowing the viewer a sense of intimacy with the subjects without sacrificing their dignity. They quietly assert themselves into the present of the landscape, their material ethereality encoding a more substantive timeless spiritual presence. As with a portrait, his subjects are usually placed toward the center of the canvas, so the pictures are simply conceived, but full of movement. While remaining grounded in perception, Holzman takes perceptual liberties with color and design, inspired by eastern art and its inference of the presence of the gods, or of the sacred or the eternal. One could say he stretches pictorial representation, in order to express the mysterious snap of each successive moment as the miracle of existence is revealed.

“For Mr. Holzman, making art is an endeavor through which intimacy and longing achieve a finely tuned, if tenuous, resolution.” — Mario Naves, The New York Observer

A graduate of Tyler School of Art (BFA ’71) and Yale University (MFA ’73), Holzman has since participated in numerous solo and curated group exhibitions at galleries in New York, Houston, Boston, Antwerp, and elsewhere. He is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as grants from the Tiffany Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Studio Space, P.S. 1. Holzman has taught at Bard College, Pratt Institute, Chicago Art Institute, Penn University, Boston University, The Studio School, and others.

Artist Statement

Working from life excited me as a student, and it still is exciting. Still, a painting that was begun from nature may become entirely different as it subsequently evolves in the studio. Some times they come quick without too much reworking, and sometimes a small painting will take years to find itself, submitting themselves to tweaking, adjusting, scraping, sanding, glazing and scumbling and any thing else that occures to me.

I am after a kind of painting that can be enjoyed experientially; by-passing the mind, felt in the body the heart and the soul, like a song that feels just right, like it has always existed. In a totally contemporary way, I am after a slow, sensual richness, much more common before the modern era.

Painting outside in nature opened doors for me. I consciously saw and I felt the vibration of energy surrounding and flowing through the trees. This was an important revelation, which I have tried to let guide my work and my life, as it led to a deeper knowing on a spiritual level.

When I drew as a child, the empty page was a place that I could pour myself into, an escape. Later it became is a place to connect my inner world and outer world; sight and feeling, memory and dream , observation and thought.

I love many kinds of painting from different places and times. I have no desire to disturb what was, I want to add. In fact there are always some other painters floating around in my mind, inspiring me, and who I am, in my own way, trying to emulate and draw guidance and inspiration from.

— Eric Holzman
http://www.ericholzman.com

Details

Start:
November 30, 2016
End:
January 31, 2017
Event Categories:
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Organizer

CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
Phone
212-677-8621
Email
info@crsny.org
View Organizer Website

Venue

CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
123 4th Ave FL3
New York, NY 10003 United States
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Phone
212-677-8621
View Venue Website