Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Scape Artist: Holder’s work a study in abstract thinking

Arriving in Las Vegas more than three decades ago, artist Tom Holder was immediately inspired by the natural and not-so-natural aesthetics of the area.

He saw the city of Las Vegas as a work of art in itself, a "kinetic art sculpture." At 4 a.m. he would drive the Strip and observe how the lights merged with dawn.

He'd photograph dilapidated billboards in their stages of decomposition. The random images that appeared below the surface layers would later inspire his collages.

But it was the rawness of the Mojave desert and its dramatic landforms, shaped by thousands of years of geological activity, that would enter his abstract work.

His most recent work is on display at the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery through Feb. 12.

The collection, created mostly during the past two years at Holder's studio in the Liberace Museum Plaza on East Tropicana Avenue, features collages and paintings inspired by Death Valley attractions: "Furnace Creek," "Dirty Sock Hot Springs" and the peculiar "Cottonball Marsh."

His painting "Wild Rose"(acrylic on canvas) was inspired by a lush area in Death Valley that Holder approached while on a seemingly never-ending drive to the area of Skidoo.

"It was a green oasis. Across the street from this campground there was this little house with trees and flowers," Holder said." "It was such a visual relief to see that lushness after that never-ending valley of nothing."

The painting features a pale- green halo on a lemon-yellow and pale-yellow background. The bottom panel is a deep blue interrupted only on the top and bottom with swatches of color.

"I suppose those could be flowers," Holder said.

Supposition is all you'll get from the UNLV art professor. His desert paintings are abstract works that incorporate bright colors, textures and patterns. The representational objects that appear within the paintings are meaningful only in design.

His works, he said, are formal relationships exploring colors, shapes and textures.

"Working abstractly probably is more open-ended in the kinds of things I like to explore, which is basically formal, compositional relationships," Holder said.

Desert bound

An admirer of topographical maps, Holder seeks areas in the desert with intriguing names and takes daylong trips with camera in hand. Using squeegees, trawls, dripping paints and other methods, he emulates on canvas the ever-changing desert floor marked by wind and water.

The second floor of the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery features his mixed-media collages made mostly of rag paper, newspaper, paint, advertising fliers and topographical maps.

The collages resemble desert erosion and also are inspired by life in Death Valley.

"Alabama Hills" is a collage that includes a black-and-white photocopied picture of Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, Calif. Blueberries, watermelon, avocado and other fruits overlap topographical maps, advertisements and paintings. Orange paint applied in broad brush strokes loosely frames the sections.

"Amargosa River" is another collage using similar images and materials.

"They're all about the ground, the surface, what lives on it, what comes out of it," Holder said. "What we have done to it."

"Mystery of Titus Canyon," a collage at one end of the gallery, tells the story of the prospector Titus who died after he separated from his team and went looking through the canyon for another source of water.

The painting includes references to petroglyphs, vultures, primitive drawings and text from the historical note Titus left behind: "Have gone down the canyon looking for the spring. Have been waiting for you. Titus."

Moving to abstract

Holder grew up in San Diego, studied at San Diego State University, then received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Afterward, Holder spent a year in Medinacelli, Spain, an artist colony 50 miles north of Madrid. On his way back from Europe he noticed the open position at UNLV and accepted.

Holder had ventured into abstract art during his first year of undergraduate studies. But when he arrived in Las Vegas, he discontinued creating airbrushed works of abstract ribbons twisting in space.

"It just seemed inappropriate somehow," Holder said. "When I came here it just changed my way of thinking about my surroundings. People are strongly influenced by their surroundings. The surroundings, the environment, people you're in contact with, the art you look at causes you to adjust your thinking.

"We encourage graduate students to find a new location. Everything becomes too familiar over time ... When you get to Death Valley it seems like there's nothing there. The more you ride around, hike around, read about it, there's so much geology."

The "Dirty Sock Hot Springs" triptych features orange and red hues, geometric shapes and broad brush strokes on one panel, earth tones and stone shapes on the second panel, and a refreshing glass of water against a deep green background on the third panel.

Regarding the first panel, Holder said, "It's sort of what happens (naturally) on a desert floor. The desert floor is always changing. The paintings evolve in the way features of the desert evolve with a different time frame, of course."

The oldest painting in the exhibit, "Ten Days In a Castle," which loosely refers to Scotty's Castle, the early-1900s home and tourist destination, was painted in 1989.

Much of Holder's work seems literal. But Holder insists there is no specific meaning.

"Work like this engages a viewer at another level," Holder said. "If you're dealing with realism, people see meaning in certain things. Look at how blue that eye is, et cetera. But I sometimes wonder what more can be said.

"Abstract looks at properties and beauty of color for its own sake, rather than what that color represents."

Looking at his collages, Holder said, "These things we all have at our disposal and I'm trying to push them to another level of interest. We're just bombarded with so much visual information it's hard to make sense out of it.

"With these collages, you have to make an effort."

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