About the Artist
Hello, friend!
After many years of creating mostly photographic visual artwork, I began painting in the winter of 2020 and became a bit obsessed with it. I love the physical act of putting paint on a substrate, and my work explores the way the interaction of color and form can interact within a plane, or space, to evoke certain emotions—and perhaps even memories.
I also work as a graphic designer, and the prints on this site are more rooted in that background and my love for a good poster (or fine art print, in this case).
My most recent painting work explores the way shades and tones of a color can suggest depth of field. This ties into my work as an interior architect and the perspective drawing studies that are part of that profession.
I like the way a suggestion of three-dimensional space can work with or against color play to amplify the feeling a painting evokes.
My larger paintings can have an additional layer of meaning: It can take substantial amounts of time to create a large field of flat color with a sharp edge, and the process becomes somewhat meditative in its repetition of brushstrokes back and forth and waiting.
The decision to spend the time on that process, rather than using a faster technique, brings to my attention the intentional simplicity of the compositions—since that simplicity is why thefields of a single color are so large.
This intentional focus on a slow process that results in something compositionally rather simple resonates deeply with part of my personal history: I was raised in the Quaker faith (not to be
confused with the Amish), which while fully embracing mainstream society and technology, traditionally places an emphasis on simple living—for the sake of being able to better notice what is truly meaningful.
In this way, the work becomes about—in addition to being about how color and composition interact to make us feel—patience, intentional simplicity, and committing to process in order to get a desired result.
Informal CV
I studied color theory using paint, life drawing, and perspective drawing
at Parsons, as part of a degree in interior architecture with a sub-major in design and architecture theory and history.
I took a painting from life class at the Art Students’ League in NYC (with extremely limited success), and took numerous clay and image-making art classes in high school.
I've had photographs in group shows at Viridian Artists and Sensei Gallery in NYC.
Bio
Holly McWhorter is an artist, writer, and designer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Brooklyn, New York. She began painting and making digital artwork in late 2020.
Her abstracts, primarily in acrylic on canvas and paper, as well as digital media, explore the ways color and form interact to evoke mood and concepts. Her larger painted works also serve to document the passage of time spent laying down a field of solid color, resulting in a physical record of a process that is repetitive and lengthy, and as such often meditative.
Geometric shapes and colors blended using an intuitive process are juxtaposed and partnered in ways that are sometimes expected but often not, creating landscapes that at times seem flat and at other times explore the shift between single-plane and three-dimensional perception.
The overall aim of the work is to evoke feeling in the viewer.