Brian Hollister
About the Artist
"One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions," wrote Mary Austin in the preface to her first book, Land of Little Rain, published in 1903.
Brian Hollister has spent many years over the course of his lifetime traveling and hiking throughout the United States, Italy, Great Britain and New Zealand, returning again and again to the southwest. During these walks, he has watched the movement of light across the surfaces of land and water. Having ample time to know something so well has made way for the birth of an inherent intimacy ~ providing the opportunity to "wait its occasions" ~ to be guided by those occasions in his work. His paintings are a culmination of how that light appears and changes over the land and water. To look at the painting, ideally, creates an ongoing immersion in nature and wilderness.
While in Siena a few years ago, there was a moment when he came face to face with banded marble cathedrals. There was an instant recognition and a new structure of painting emerged creating a connection between this banding and the strata of the landscapes so evocative in the Southwest. This structure empowered him away from composition, allowing for a greater focus on the expressive power of color and light.
Painting, for Mr. Hollister, offers the possibility to slow down, to be alive in the moment of the fusion of nature and culture. Rather than being an illustration, he makes paintings that seek to offer an experience of what it feels like to be in and of the landscape during "summer and winter" - to convey a sense of place without specificity, an attempt to go beyond something that can be described yet not defined.