Bud Holman

Blue Mist, Sag Harbor, NY

1972

Bud Holman is a master who was a regular in the New York art world for twenty years (from 1954–1974) when his closest friends were Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg. He had started off as a curator at MoMA and then became director of a major gallery. During the early 1960s he was the artist-curator who built David Rockefeller’s famous art collection for Chase Manhattan Bank. Despite his connections reading like a Who’s Who in the New York art world he was never an opportunist. In 1974 this prodigal son returned to the West of his youth — first Santa Fe and then Arizona — always near the mountains. There he meditated on what the beauty of the sacred lands of the Native Americans really meant. Roaming their mountains, hills, and high deserts he found peace — and a new fervor. As his mature style emerged, he became increasingly reclusive, devoted to capturing on canvas the vibrant spirit of the Western landscape. An energy reverberates through his paintings in a myriad of colors applied with bravura brushwork. It’s how he captures movement in space, light, and color dancing across the surface. Most landscape painters direct the eye to paths that lead to focal points deep in a scene. Holman’s vibrant brushwork instead creates color paths that draw our gaze upwards to the high horizon bands that crown his landscapes, releasing us to the sky like a pressure valve. This is how his compositions resonate and play to our subconscious. In short, his finished canvases make the sublime visual. Holman avoided exhibiting until a 2017 retrospective at the Mulvane Art Museum in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas. Now 95, he continues to paint many hours every day at his studio home in Nogales, Arizona. - Peter Hastings Falk