Hailed for her rapturous visions of the feminine, artist Hollye Davidson is on a mission to make a difference. With large-scale paintings as enigmatic as they are intimate, her interest in spirit taking form has led to the creation of an ongoing series of illuminating portraits she paints locally from her studio in West Chelsea. After shadowing under the wing of renowned artist Eugene Massin for many years, who emphasized the importance of developing Hollye’s particular style of line drawing, she would go on to develop her own signature visual style, a language continually in a state of evolution. Treating her canvases as a site of reflection informed by human spirit, this work goes much deeper than your typical flow state. “Painting feels, to me, like a literal expression of human consciousness. It is a fascinating way of communicating what may be present but not immediately visible,” reflects the artist.
What begins as a simple practice in drawing, Hollye later refines with her unique painted application technique – a mix of gentle brushwork and soft color pigments. Having lived through many life passages, including a near death experience, Hollye revels in the painterly worlds she creates from intimate exchanges with live models, what has become a definitive dimension of her artistic practice over the years. As if attempting to frame or grasp her subject’s ‘inner light,’ Hollye likens her figurative paintings to snapshots of the model’s aura.
Cultivating spaces of shared intimacy with her subjects lends to the profoundly fluid sense of emotionality in her works. Studying her subjects deeply, her painterly gaze penetrates beneath skin level to the multitudes of energy cloaked in the unseen realm. Curator Jane Hart writes that “Davidson offers a soulful look at others that borders on epiphany.” As if visualizing layered colors of air, whether abstracting the nervous tensions or electric epiphanies of her subjects, everything unseen becomes vibrantly transparent.
Integrating aesthetic techniques which historically broke the rules of painterly tradition – broken-color, Fauvism and Nabi – Hollye conceives of her working canvases as open space, “where the subject is free to convey layered emotions of their humanity.” While some might lump her into a more minimalist school, others would attest that by harnessing the eloquence of color and line, Hollye’s characteristically subtle contours reveal the layered feeling states of her models.
Depicting sensibilities which wholly transcend the mundane world, her works read like a careful meditation on the fractal contours of vulnerability and depth of feeling inherent to the human experience. With bold lines inspired by Japanese woodblock, her large-scale decorative oil paintings interpenetrate line, empty space and liberal color to express the undercurrents of the feeling world and the glowing effervescence of inner light.
From her new series of Goddesses emerges an image titled Venus Letting Go. In this classic reinvention, the Goddess of Love and War stands in a stunning gown, the idealized feminine dropping her fancy shoes to stand barefoot. In another painting, a modern-day Artemis reclines nude with a single silent heron and a roaring tiger. The primordial Huntress having found leisure, has prioritized the feminine being over the patriarchal pressure to do. In another new work, Gaia, the Greek Mother of the world reinvisioned, challenges our deep-seated social-conditioning and preconceived ideas about women, gender and sexuality.
Confident that each living woman is a Goddess in her own right, as vulnerable as they are powerful, Hollye’s paintings in this vein blur myth with reality, social progress with aesthetic pleasure, lived experience with painterly tradition. In our interview, Hollye reflected that Goddess archetypes weren’t something she sought out, but rather, was a prerogative which emerged organically as she employed female models as subjects over the years. Like her series of unbridled horses, these works leap at the viewer with a palpable strength and joie de vivre.
Ironic as it may be, Hollye’s life-long study of color theory has long been shaped by a limited field of perception. Since a young age, she experienced near blindness in her left eye, what esoteric traditions would link to her feminine energy, right brain and lunar or ‘yin’ consciousness. Coincidentally, this groups Davidson with the likes of great painters like Rembrandt, whose stereoblindness (inability to see in 3D), was an experiential incubator influencing the creation of some of his master paintings.
As for Hollye, when a recent cataract operation miraculously restored her vision, as unexpected for the artist as it was for her doctor, she began to see in 3D. With Hollye’s renewed field of vision came a deeper sense of visual dimensionalityevidenced in the careful nuances vivifying her latest body of work. Hollye notes that Monet, who also suffered from cataracts clouding the vision of his eyes, saw the world through a prism of color distortion that inevitably influenced some of his greatest masterpieces.
As new possibilities emerge every day, a fluidity of perspective continually shapes and reshapes Davidson’s studio practice. “Every scar is a gift,” shared Hollye, who remains open to the turbulent flow of creation, wherever it may take her. From pioneering a leading women-run electronic business she founded in the early 2000s to the walls of the Waldorf Astoria, where she’s slated for a Fall group and solo show, Hollye brings a genuine pedigree to the field. With tremendous imagination and humble empathy for her fellow human beings, Davidson continues to imbue her canvases with a stirring quantum vision that transcends modern contemporary techniques while probing deep beneath surface aesthetics.
Working between Miami and New York City, Hollye Davidson is a visual artist whose work has graced museums, galleries, contemporary art fairs and public spaces throughout New York, London and Berlin. Hollye earned her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the University of Miami, including a year of study abroad in London, and an apprenticeship early in her career with Master Artist Eugene Massin.
Selected new works will be on view during Unbridled: The Spirit of The Horse at the Waldorf Astoria uptown later this month sponsored by MVVO.
Learn more at https://www.hollyedavidson.com/
Follow the Artist on Instagram @Hollyedavidsonart
