SGH 2018

SUSAN G HOLLAND   Painter (Oils, Watercolor, Mixed Media)  and Carver of Wood.

Susan Holland has lived in the Seattle area since 1973, when she and her three children moved here from her native state of Pennsylvania. Susan is a product of The Tyler School of Fine Art, having won The Walter H. Annenberg four-year full tuition scholarship to Temple as a graduate of The George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County. Susan was almost born with a paintbrush in her hand! By 1943 she was begging her mother for oil paints. Blessed by the enduring presence of artists, and of original paintings and live classical music in her childhood home, it was natural for her to draw, paint, model, and sculpt things. Her drawings can be found in the archives of handbooks for students at The George School. Gimbel's in Philadelphia awarded her a prize and published her mixed media work during her senior year.  Her work has earned subsequent awards when she has actively sold work in many Northwest competitions, including the Pacific Northwest Arts Fair during the early 1990's where she was awarded a booth for her drawings, and also won two prizes in the juried show, one a first prize in painting. Her business, SGHolland Artistic Pursuits began at that time and continues to this day as SGHolland Art Studio. She has work in homes on both coasts and sprinkled in between. She is honored to have been collected by the owners of Meadow Wood Farm  in Monroe, and did many commissioned works for the McMillan family.

Juried show awards for pastels, gouaches, oils, and watercolors have popped up over the years. Past showings include juried shows in Issaquah, Mercer Island, Redmond, Bellevue, and a solo show in Frame Design NW formerly in Issaquah.

At the excellent Tyler School, Susan welcomed exposure to a wide gamut of traditional art instruction including painting, drawing, sculpture, wood and stone carving, modeling, etching and lithography, and even the basics of grinding her own paint from pigments and oils, and casting her own three dimensional works. She went on to work in display advertising until she married and began a family.

During the childhood of her three children, Susan designed and taught a challenging art curriculum to grades 1 through 8 at a small private school in return for her children's tuition.

When relocated to Issaquah, WA, Susan curated and delivered a seventy-work exhibition of art called 3 Americas, called in from the far north to the far south of the Americas, shown at UMDNJ in New Brunswick NJ and at Lincoln Center in NYC in 2001. During the same time she co-founded a pioneering online gallery called ARTFACES.com, which is still running today. It was one of the first of such things!!

Today she works in two general genres: wood carving and painting very often intermingling, with texture and form invading paints, and paint and stains invading her carvings. She started a "DBA" called Silk Purse Products some five years ago,  in conjunction with her long-time parent business, SGHolland Art Studio (,AKA  SGHolland Artistic Pursuits),  using found natural and manufactured wood forms to make carved, textured,  and often stained or painted art works.  Many carvings have moving parts due to Susan's penchant to making sculptural forms to enhance holes and blemishes in natural wood grains. 

Locally, she shows at Seattle Design Center's EAFA gallery, ArtEAST in Issaquah,  and in local art walk venues. Susan's  original watercolor cachet for Issaquah Post Office's first day of issue envelope  for their opening day hangs in the lobby in the USPS facility on Gilman Boulevard in Issaquah WA.

Susan's art comes only in “original.”

SPINOFFERY .. THE EXCEPTION

Digital “spinoffs” alone are printed for market as note cards.  These designs are the fruit of studio photo work, images of Susan's own work in progress that are then put through one or more digital manipulation programs on the computer.  The experimentation with distortions of line, form and color are uniquely digital..that is, composed of 1's and 0's within the computer code.  Susan's old friends from computer programming days are coming home to roost within her files, and available to see either on a computer screen or in a printed format with pixels.   There is no way for these to be one-of-a-kind unless there is one print made and then the file destroyed entirely.   This is the only exception Susan will make to her intention to "make only originals."

PHOTO OF SUSAN AT TOP OF PAGE:

 "Susan Talking"  digital rendering of a profile photo.

 Susan loves to talk!  It's her eijoyment of an on-going dialog with many who follow her blogs and online forum commentaries.  She is quoted in the sites and books of the late Robert Genn,  and is active in art forums and writing forums online, including LinkedIn fine art forums,  FASO forums, and Cowbird.com, a writing collective.

HOW TO BUY

Susan Holland's work may be purchased by contacting her through her website, www.ooothere.com , or through her galleries.  Purchases may be made by personal check, or by PayPal, which keeps banking information private to buying and selling parties.  (Susan always stands behind her work, and will make good on purchases that are returned in reasonable time after delivery.)  

Her new site named Art-One-Offs will be a store front for a large archive of original works, including paintings, wood carvings and unique self-pulled prints from blocks or plates.  (each inking and pulling produces a different image because of the human interface and changes in ink quality and quantity.)