NIGHT VISION - The Art of Kathleen Holder
A native of Madison, Wisconsin, Kathleen Holder earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin. She was a Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and her drawings have been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in drawing.
Kathleen Holder's atmospheric pastel drawings have been called psychic landscapes. Like doorways, they offer a glimpse into a into a country lit by intangible radiance, inexplicably familiar. They are a celebration of light, and darkness as it reveals the light. We speak of "enlightenment" - and yet her work suggests another way of seeing, what might be called "endarkenment". Her work invokes the Moon, and encourages us to learn to see by the light of the Moon. Lunar light is the light of ambiguity, the other order of life, the order of inversion and relativity. By the Moon's light, we begin to see that everything is always shifting, and that we are also shape-shifters.
"The Nigrado Series", and "The December Series" were about emergence and integration - the initiation into "night vision". Nigrado means "Journey into the Abyss", a term from alchemy. It is the first phase of alchemical work. The lead is dissolved, and the solution becomes black. As a metaphor for transformation, Nigrado is the "dark night of the soul" the burning point at which personality has dissolved, and a new self has not yet congealed. With The Nigrado Series Kathleen Holder documented one of the most difficult periods in her life."It was as if death were chasing me" she said. Images from this series are an intense distillation of energy. In one drawing there is a threatening entity that seems to be manifesting in the corner of a room, a terrifying intrusion. In another drawing a being of light appears, a guide, or an angelic presence.
By agreeing to fully encounter herself within her work, by "becoming the Moon", Kathleen's despair became exploration, and ultimately, celebration of life's mystery and spiraling evolutionary process. Her landscapes are infused with an alternate kind of illumination; and to enter one must, indeed, develop a form of "night vision" in order to see what appears to be hidden. What the artist suggests is hidden is our radiance.
INTERVIEW WITH KATHLEEN HOLDER
Lauren: How did The December Series come about?
Kathleen: My life had become at that time very murky, and that December I fell into some kind of abyss. I decided to consult a Tarot deck a friend had given me, even though my knowledge of the cards was limited. That particular evening, the card that represented me was The Moon. It was the last card I wanted to draw!....I tried to remember the benevolent as well as the malevolent meanings of the card, but at the time I was truly experiencing the "dark side of the Moon".
Finally, I thought, "Well, alright, I'll be the Moon." I'll do work about the illumination that comes from the Moon, which is very different from the illumination that comes from lightness and clarity, from the Sun. So, I went into my studio and said, "Ok, I am the Moon. I'm willing to be it." And that's how The December Series started.
"The December Series" is about the Tarot card The Moon, but it is also about the way we see in the dark, about night vision, and the actual quality of light that comes from the Moon, which is rather magical.
I'd been looking at the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder around that time, and I saw this painting called "Macbeth and the Three Witches". I stood in front of that painting thinking, "What a dark, crusty, murky painting." And then this incredible thing happened. Even though it's a small painting, it has such presence; it makes you adapt to a kind of night vision to see the work. Then, if you stay with it, all kinds of interesting things emerge from that dark little canvas.
The work is about my life. That's all it can be about. Your work is about your life, and if you are fortunate enough to do great work, it not only is about your life, but it transcends your life and encompasses parallel experiences in many lives. "The December Series" was about experiences I had during that particular December. Yet, I'm not doing illustrations of an experience; that misses the point. There was a certain energy exchange, a certain illumination that occurred that I wanted to share and talk about. The first piece in the series actually served as a catharsis, once I had gotten through and beyond the pain of those experiences.
Lauren: You said that your work became essential to your healing....
With "Sympathetic Magic", I was thinking that perhaps the work could be a game board, in which I could go through a kind of sympathetic magic, and avoid having to deal with certain harsh experiences. Maybe I could give form to the cataclysmic stuff, and if I gave it form in the paintings, I wouldn't have to live it.
Certain experiences produced my "Nigrado Series" . At the time, it was as if death were chasing me. I couldn't give voice to the terror, the rage, the god awfulness of everything I had experienced. The work was an absolute necessity, it was part of the healing. The work that resulted from that experience, as well as the knowledge and insight I gained, was good. So, the negative charge of the work set off a number of positive charges.
It kept me from doing anything destructive. It helped me to see how awesomely beautiful it all was. Otherwise, I might not have seen it, I might have only had a knee-jerk emotional response: "This hurts, let me out of here!" It kept me from running away, so I could stay awhile and discover beauty. One can learn to embrace those dark experiences, as much as embracing the joyous experiences one has.
"NIgredo #17"
This is a very Jungian notion. It is a sign of wholeness to be able to say to yourself, "Yes, I'm vulgar, I'm evil, but I'm also a glowing light, I'm also God and God is all of these things." The duality is working toward the center, and when one accepts that, everything seems so much easier....nothing is threatening. There is a reason for everything, everything is meant to educate you in some way.
Lauren: You also speak of your work being about light. What does that mean to you?
Kathleen: There was an experience I had when I was in my twenties that changed me in many ways.
I would do yoga for an hour every day, and then a half-hour of meditation. One day while I was meditating, I realized that I was neither awake nor asleep, but in some in-between state. I felt some part of me get up, and I saw that there were two of me. There was the "me" lying on the floor, and another "me" that was standing. The standing figure bent down, and starting at the top of my head, began peeling away a very thin, gossamer-like veil in the shape of my body, which was my persona, so that when this "peeling away" was done, there were three of me.
The part of me that was standing held a thin veil, which I recognized as Kathy Holder, or at least that person people say "Hi" to and "Let's go have a beer" and "Who are you mad at? Who are you friends with?" This aspect, the aspect of me that they recognized, was so thin, like a gossamer cloth. And then I looked again at the figure on the floor, and what I saw were hundreds of thousands of filaments of light, just glowing, pulsing light. What I experienced were three manifestations of myself. The self that stood - which was almost without substance, a ghost with a presence - and the veil, and the Light.
Lauren: How did you feel about it then? Were you frightened?
Kathleen: I wanted to stay there! All I knew was that whatever life was as I had known it, it was completely unsatisfactory, given this new revelation. I never wanted to go back to that life, but I had to. I tried to recreate the experience for several years - but of course I couldn't, because when ego is in there going "gimme, gimme, gimme", it's just not possible.
Lauren: What would you like others to get from your work?
Kathleen: My work doesn't hold up well at gala openings, because there is too much noise. You need a certain level of quiet to make contact with it.
There is a place I want to take people, but I don't know if I can give a name to it. I know it, but I can't describe it, and the work is my attempt to arrive at a description. Rothko's Chapel paintings do that. He seems to be talking about a place without a name, a place with a kind of density and atmosphere. If you spend time with his work, doorways open up within the paintings. Yet, the painting itself is a door, a tunnel.
I saw my first Rothko at the age of 18. I was stunned. I stood before it and couldn't begin to understand the mind of the man that made it. All I knew was that I did not want to leave the room. There was a light, a potency. Ten years later, I stood in front of a painting by Rembrandt; it was a painting of a girl in a white dress, bathing in a pool of water. And again, all I wanted to do was to stay forever in the grace of that painting.
When I was in graduate school, I became dissatisfied with the work I was then doing. I found I was drawing what I thought was the energy in form, and yet, what I was really drawing were only the edges. I had to let go of the preoccupation with form, I had to get "beneath the skin"....from a formalist point of view, art can be about texture or value, color and composition. From that perspective, my work now is about color and light. But it's also about that other Light, an attempt to move toward a clarification of it.
So, when I began to think about what was really important to address in my work, I asked myself "If I were to die, what would I like to leave behind?" And I remembered my experience, and the Light I saw. And I remembered how I felt when I first saw the paintings of Rothko, and when I saw Rembrandt.
I didn't know it at the time, but the connection was the light - the Light I saw in the paintings of Rembrandt, the Light in Rothko, and the Light I saw in myself. Perhaps the seed was that one experience of seeing myself as Light.
We're human, and I believe we're not here because we're gods and goddesses, but to polish ourselves. So, we fall into traps, we regress and go forward, we make mistakes and repeat mistakes until we finally get it. Until we wholly absorb the teachings. There are moments when I can still get enraged about my various experiences, when I feel victimized and all those indulgent things. There are also moments of sublime clarity about the relatedness of it all, the okayness of it.
When I was younger, I used to think that to know something, you needed to find out its name. You found out as much information as possible, and then you could know it, put it in your file cabinet. It was concrete, it had categories. But as I got older, I realized that there is no concrete kind of truth. Life seems to consist of a peeling away of veils....you peel away one, and say to yourself, "Ah, so that's it", and just when you are ready to file it away, something shifts, and you find that you don't know after all, there is another veil, and so you have to stay with it. It's a continual peeling away of veils that conceal the truth, but also expose it....yet never completely.
The place I might want to take the viewer is no longer concrete the way it might have been when I was younger. We're separated from that by some kind of veil.
It worries me that my art is so deadly serious sometimes! I can point at myself and say, "Hey, we need a little levity here!" but I can't do work that has any humor.
Phillip Guston is one of my favorite artists. I tried for years to hate him, but his images haunt you, they call you back again. To me he's the holy clown, pointing the way in all of its absurdity. His paintings are satori jolts.
What happens is that you look at the paintings and think, "Oh, these are really stupid." And then, in the midst of knowing them as stupid, you understand "My God, they're so tragic." And then you're crying, because they're so tragic. And in the midst of tears, you see how funny it is, and you're right back on the wheel. Guston is the wheel, he takes you around and around, he keeps undressing it for you. You laugh because you're crying, and you cry because you're laughing, and finally it's just this wonderment, an open embrace with life, not negating the vulgar or the uncomfortable aspects of being.
Instead, it's holding them up and saying "Look, this is awful, this is silly, this is so tragic, look what a mess we put ourselves in to find the truth! Look what we have to do!"
copyright Lauren Raine 1988, Kathleen Holder 1988
A native of Madison, Wisconsin, Kathleen Holder earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin. She was a Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and her drawings have been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in drawing.
Kathleen Holder's atmospheric pastel drawings have been called psychic landscapes. Like doorways, they offer a glimpse into a into a country lit by intangible radiance, inexplicably familiar. They are a celebration of light, and darkness as it reveals the light. We speak of "enlightenment" - and yet her work suggests another way of seeing, what might be called "endarkenment". Her work invokes the Moon, and encourages us to learn to see by the light of the Moon. Lunar light is the light of ambiguity, the other order of life, the order of inversion and relativity. By the Moon's light, we begin to see that everything is always shifting, and that we are also shape-shifters.
"The Nigrado Series", and "The December Series" were about emergence and integration - the initiation into "night vision". Nigrado means "Journey into the Abyss", a term from alchemy. It is the first phase of alchemical work. The lead is dissolved, and the solution becomes black. As a metaphor for transformation, Nigrado is the "dark night of the soul" the burning point at which personality has dissolved, and a new self has not yet congealed. With The Nigrado Series Kathleen Holder documented one of the most difficult periods in her life."It was as if death were chasing me" she said. Images from this series are an intense distillation of energy. In one drawing there is a threatening entity that seems to be manifesting in the corner of a room, a terrifying intrusion. In another drawing a being of light appears, a guide, or an angelic presence.
By agreeing to fully encounter herself within her work, by "becoming the Moon", Kathleen's despair became exploration, and ultimately, celebration of life's mystery and spiraling evolutionary process. Her landscapes are infused with an alternate kind of illumination; and to enter one must, indeed, develop a form of "night vision" in order to see what appears to be hidden. What the artist suggests is hidden is our radiance.
INTERVIEW WITH KATHLEEN HOLDER
Lauren: How did The December Series come about?
Kathleen: My life had become at that time very murky, and that December I fell into some kind of abyss. I decided to consult a Tarot deck a friend had given me, even though my knowledge of the cards was limited. That particular evening, the card that represented me was The Moon. It was the last card I wanted to draw!....I tried to remember the benevolent as well as the malevolent meanings of the card, but at the time I was truly experiencing the "dark side of the Moon".
Finally, I thought, "Well, alright, I'll be the Moon." I'll do work about the illumination that comes from the Moon, which is very different from the illumination that comes from lightness and clarity, from the Sun. So, I went into my studio and said, "Ok, I am the Moon. I'm willing to be it." And that's how The December Series started.
"The December Series" is about the Tarot card The Moon, but it is also about the way we see in the dark, about night vision, and the actual quality of light that comes from the Moon, which is rather magical.
I'd been looking at the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder around that time, and I saw this painting called "Macbeth and the Three Witches". I stood in front of that painting thinking, "What a dark, crusty, murky painting." And then this incredible thing happened. Even though it's a small painting, it has such presence; it makes you adapt to a kind of night vision to see the work. Then, if you stay with it, all kinds of interesting things emerge from that dark little canvas.
The work is about my life. That's all it can be about. Your work is about your life, and if you are fortunate enough to do great work, it not only is about your life, but it transcends your life and encompasses parallel experiences in many lives. "The December Series" was about experiences I had during that particular December. Yet, I'm not doing illustrations of an experience; that misses the point. There was a certain energy exchange, a certain illumination that occurred that I wanted to share and talk about. The first piece in the series actually served as a catharsis, once I had gotten through and beyond the pain of those experiences.
Lauren: You said that your work became essential to your healing....
With "Sympathetic Magic", I was thinking that perhaps the work could be a game board, in which I could go through a kind of sympathetic magic, and avoid having to deal with certain harsh experiences. Maybe I could give form to the cataclysmic stuff, and if I gave it form in the paintings, I wouldn't have to live it.
Certain experiences produced my "Nigrado Series" . At the time, it was as if death were chasing me. I couldn't give voice to the terror, the rage, the god awfulness of everything I had experienced. The work was an absolute necessity, it was part of the healing. The work that resulted from that experience, as well as the knowledge and insight I gained, was good. So, the negative charge of the work set off a number of positive charges.
It kept me from doing anything destructive. It helped me to see how awesomely beautiful it all was. Otherwise, I might not have seen it, I might have only had a knee-jerk emotional response: "This hurts, let me out of here!" It kept me from running away, so I could stay awhile and discover beauty. One can learn to embrace those dark experiences, as much as embracing the joyous experiences one has.
"NIgredo #17"
This is a very Jungian notion. It is a sign of wholeness to be able to say to yourself, "Yes, I'm vulgar, I'm evil, but I'm also a glowing light, I'm also God and God is all of these things." The duality is working toward the center, and when one accepts that, everything seems so much easier....nothing is threatening. There is a reason for everything, everything is meant to educate you in some way.
Lauren: You also speak of your work being about light. What does that mean to you?
Kathleen: There was an experience I had when I was in my twenties that changed me in many ways.
I would do yoga for an hour every day, and then a half-hour of meditation. One day while I was meditating, I realized that I was neither awake nor asleep, but in some in-between state. I felt some part of me get up, and I saw that there were two of me. There was the "me" lying on the floor, and another "me" that was standing. The standing figure bent down, and starting at the top of my head, began peeling away a very thin, gossamer-like veil in the shape of my body, which was my persona, so that when this "peeling away" was done, there were three of me.
The part of me that was standing held a thin veil, which I recognized as Kathy Holder, or at least that person people say "Hi" to and "Let's go have a beer" and "Who are you mad at? Who are you friends with?" This aspect, the aspect of me that they recognized, was so thin, like a gossamer cloth. And then I looked again at the figure on the floor, and what I saw were hundreds of thousands of filaments of light, just glowing, pulsing light. What I experienced were three manifestations of myself. The self that stood - which was almost without substance, a ghost with a presence - and the veil, and the Light.
Lauren: How did you feel about it then? Were you frightened?
Kathleen: I wanted to stay there! All I knew was that whatever life was as I had known it, it was completely unsatisfactory, given this new revelation. I never wanted to go back to that life, but I had to. I tried to recreate the experience for several years - but of course I couldn't, because when ego is in there going "gimme, gimme, gimme", it's just not possible.
Lauren: What would you like others to get from your work?
Kathleen: My work doesn't hold up well at gala openings, because there is too much noise. You need a certain level of quiet to make contact with it.
There is a place I want to take people, but I don't know if I can give a name to it. I know it, but I can't describe it, and the work is my attempt to arrive at a description. Rothko's Chapel paintings do that. He seems to be talking about a place without a name, a place with a kind of density and atmosphere. If you spend time with his work, doorways open up within the paintings. Yet, the painting itself is a door, a tunnel.
I saw my first Rothko at the age of 18. I was stunned. I stood before it and couldn't begin to understand the mind of the man that made it. All I knew was that I did not want to leave the room. There was a light, a potency. Ten years later, I stood in front of a painting by Rembrandt; it was a painting of a girl in a white dress, bathing in a pool of water. And again, all I wanted to do was to stay forever in the grace of that painting.
When I was in graduate school, I became dissatisfied with the work I was then doing. I found I was drawing what I thought was the energy in form, and yet, what I was really drawing were only the edges. I had to let go of the preoccupation with form, I had to get "beneath the skin"....from a formalist point of view, art can be about texture or value, color and composition. From that perspective, my work now is about color and light. But it's also about that other Light, an attempt to move toward a clarification of it.
So, when I began to think about what was really important to address in my work, I asked myself "If I were to die, what would I like to leave behind?" And I remembered my experience, and the Light I saw. And I remembered how I felt when I first saw the paintings of Rothko, and when I saw Rembrandt.
I didn't know it at the time, but the connection was the light - the Light I saw in the paintings of Rembrandt, the Light in Rothko, and the Light I saw in myself. Perhaps the seed was that one experience of seeing myself as Light.
We're human, and I believe we're not here because we're gods and goddesses, but to polish ourselves. So, we fall into traps, we regress and go forward, we make mistakes and repeat mistakes until we finally get it. Until we wholly absorb the teachings. There are moments when I can still get enraged about my various experiences, when I feel victimized and all those indulgent things. There are also moments of sublime clarity about the relatedness of it all, the okayness of it.
When I was younger, I used to think that to know something, you needed to find out its name. You found out as much information as possible, and then you could know it, put it in your file cabinet. It was concrete, it had categories. But as I got older, I realized that there is no concrete kind of truth. Life seems to consist of a peeling away of veils....you peel away one, and say to yourself, "Ah, so that's it", and just when you are ready to file it away, something shifts, and you find that you don't know after all, there is another veil, and so you have to stay with it. It's a continual peeling away of veils that conceal the truth, but also expose it....yet never completely.
The place I might want to take the viewer is no longer concrete the way it might have been when I was younger. We're separated from that by some kind of veil.
It worries me that my art is so deadly serious sometimes! I can point at myself and say, "Hey, we need a little levity here!" but I can't do work that has any humor.
Phillip Guston is one of my favorite artists. I tried for years to hate him, but his images haunt you, they call you back again. To me he's the holy clown, pointing the way in all of its absurdity. His paintings are satori jolts.
What happens is that you look at the paintings and think, "Oh, these are really stupid." And then, in the midst of knowing them as stupid, you understand "My God, they're so tragic." And then you're crying, because they're so tragic. And in the midst of tears, you see how funny it is, and you're right back on the wheel. Guston is the wheel, he takes you around and around, he keeps undressing it for you. You laugh because you're crying, and you cry because you're laughing, and finally it's just this wonderment, an open embrace with life, not negating the vulgar or the uncomfortable aspects of being.
Instead, it's holding them up and saying "Look, this is awful, this is silly, this is so tragic, look what a mess we put ourselves in to find the truth! Look what we have to do!"
copyright Lauren Raine 1988, Kathleen Holder 1988