Theodore Holdt
I have been living and working as an artist in Portland and the Columbia River Gorge since 1993. I am an oil painter, beekeeper, builder, tree grafter, sculptor, writer and musician. My work is what is in front of me and what gathers on ledges around me. I am a chaos maker. I am a fixer and a breaker of things. I can be extremely industrious and very lazy.
ABOUT MY WORK
The first time I saw Michelangelo's David I was five years old. The second time I saw it I was thirteen and it shocked me because of how much it had shrunk. Michelangelo wrote - 'Whoever does not like the leaves ought not to come here in May.' Our story is about time, chronos, circular time. The size and shape of things change. Everything influences us, even in its absence.
Without the memories that I have developed through time I would be a child freshly born...no, I would be just-conceived. I am always building on this story and working toward the end of it, may it be death or forgetfulness. I end up spending a large portion of my time making things that seem to have little purpose like paintings, sculptures, masks, and music. I get absorbed in them and through them I sometimes brush up against that being that was before memory started...if memory started. It's like digging to find a hole.
Painting for me eats double exposed images with a camera and spilling mustard on the sidewalk and carving your name in a block of ice and licking the sweat of off your lovers thigh and tasting fresh fruit after a fast and singing into a well and dancing all night and going into a ceremony and mopping and playing the flute, and smashing rocks together to make rhythms to greet the Dali Lama, finding a sunny sleepy spot in the grass, crushing your toe with a dropped rock, the dust gathering on house plants, hummingbirds trapped in skylights, driving and throat singing… bouncing harmonics off of the windshield, singing into a looping machine, sex in the late morning with the sun coming in through the leaves of the big leaf maple casting hand print shadows on skin, chasing chickens through the yard, swinging in the hammock and inventing things to make living easier and less destructive.
Art swallows it all.
When I look back at my life I see many things. I see my childhood through the filter of now. I see the many different filters that I have passed through. Each one seems to be a less and more obscured way in which to be a gazing. While I am painting the paint becomes my filter, my teacher and my guide. I get to examine how I deal with the present moment. Like a tree root that struggles as it burrows into the earth. It cuts itself on sharp stones as it searches for nutrients and water...sustenance. As it grows it gets stronger and thicker. Over time it can break apart stone, lift houses and infiltrate water lines. Slow persistence. These tendrils of my progress reach out in all directions, into the dark, exploring and seeking nourishment. This is a personal “metaphor” for my process. But what of the product? Why value a painting? Sometimes it is not so clear. But I do value the shade of a large tree. I do value the strength of its branches as the rain and wind move them and make them dance. Without roots the tree is easily toppled. I find my strength to greet the day in the act of creating. I have spent time gazing at the wonder around me. In that gazing I have often found a the same quietness come over me that I experience in creating. To be in this awe is a gift that quiets my mind and allows for the song of the multiverse to creep in.
MINIATURE PAINTINGS IN THE “I AM HUNTING YOU ARE HUNTED SERIES”
I began painting miniatures a few years ago when I was snowed in for three weeks, in the Gorge where I live, in a house that I built with my partner. I was surprised by how big the spaces got and how my interest was held. I was even more surprised at how it felt to have ten of them. When I had painted one hundred of them I knew that something was happening. I have continued. I set a goal of 1000 for this show. I am now up to 1116 in my possession. That does not count the ones that I have sold, gifted, lost or the one that my friend found on the street outside his office one day on the sidewalk. Someone had stolen it and then lost it. These paintings are like little animals dissected, ground score fruit, honeycomb from my hives, naps. I am seeking them out and to finish one is to kill it and make it ready for consuming. “YOU” signifies not me, but does it really mean you? And what is “not me”? What is being hunted? I ask you to repeat you in your head fifty times and see how that makes you feel. You you you you you you you you you you you you……… Is it a chant, a cry of an animal, or the sound of something whizzing by your head? Close your eyes and feel it. What do you see? I see what I paint. I paint what I see. I paint you.
You are…. One thousand tiny worlds. In the beginning. Blocks of wood. Small illusions presented to be measured.
I am flying through star nebula looking for the center of my discomfort.
Playing with a live deck of cards. Keys to little worlds. Friends in my pockets. Ears and horns. Strange technology. Possible futures. Improbable picnics.Combined genetics. Science fiction. Tarot. Sacred texts leading to undiscovered science. Inedible foods. Short arms. Shells and wings. We are insects\Teeth need no sharpening. Wounds. Decapitation. Sweaters made from blood that are actually clean and cozy. My insides have become my outsides. Battles in the sky. Music made from live animals. Photos from the future. Tube worm sonatas. A red squid you can dance with. Shadow people angels are for atheists. Funny ducks distracting horned schoolboys. Erections. Fire breathing pandas arguing semantics. Softness. Serene heads of sexy things. Red dotted lands emptied of critters. Space ships. Vicious queens being presented with bloody bunnies. Normal animals. Twins. Snail dancers. Creatures on a cliff. Sentient objects grouping. Owl leather. Robot factories. Heads. Lots of heads. Temples to heads. Floating heads. Bowling with bubblegum. Lone house under a hill peopled by conjoined twins.
Solitary fruit. Boats. Cyborg café. Buttons on long coats. Toothy small critters in the yellow grass.
Rats playing trumpets. A green haze with a lone wispy flower. Eskimo. Eskimo. Inuit. My cloak has teeth and I am being tickled by worms. Red windows.
The roots of the tree in my stomach hide little people who tell me useful information that I can not share with you verbally.
She has a metal helmet on her head that keeps out the voices .
Bring your space suit to space.
Your hands are attached to your shoulder blades and have been mistaken for wings.
I am hunting. You are hunted. Protect this. Guard this. Wait here. Sit down. Look at this. I invite you in to my tiny house on the sharpened edge.
NOT PAINTING
Painting as a byproduct of a life, leavings, meanings, building blocks for awareness. Painting as an undoing, an unraveling, untying an unfishing.
Painting is a harvest or a regurgitation of a harvest.
Painting as unpainting, uncreating, not painting. Creating an image by destroying an image. Non intention.
Painting as a gobbler of time, a killer of the clock, a smasher of youth.
Painting to reminded me not to think of it, not to act on it, not to covet it, not to own it.
Painting to make me giggle when alone, to make me hate painting, to make me need painting, to make me avoid painting to make me paint too much.
Painting as technology, so amazing, faster than photoshop, slower than a mamothsickle. Painting as artificial intelligence or as real stupidity. Painting when I should be cleaning, eating, gardening, sleeping. Painting never interrupting cooking. Cooking is painting but painting is not cooking. I have painted in my sleep, on a bus, on a plane, in several countries, in altered states, but I have never painted underwater. One day I will paint underwater, oils, in an ocean.
OIL PAINT
I have a love relationship with oil paint. It is sexy and stubborn. It sometimes surprises me. I keep trying to do things with it that it tells me it does not want to do. It keeps teaching me its expanding boundaries and then changing overnight. I go to sleep with it staining my hands and face and in my hair when we are spending lots of time together. (sexy!) Paint follows all the rules of the knowable multiverse and I am using it to study…. it.
EXAMINATION OF PROCESS
Sketchbooks have always interested me. Most of the time they interest me more than the art people produce. I have noticed that there is something in the sketchbook that is more alive than in what most artists feel comfortable showing. I have been trying to, over the years, create an atmosphere with my painting panels of a sketchbook that has been torn apart and scattered all over the studio… exploded. Studies get painted over and scraped off and erased. In my early sketchbooks I would go back and forth through the pages adding something to a old drawing, gluing things in, painting over, taking notes, phone numbers, food, found objects glued to swelling pages. Finished “artwork” seemed to be a safer tamer more civilized place. Sketchbooks were always places for breaking the rules and putting down things I might not want people to see because it made me feel uncomfortable or because it did not fit into what I thought a finished piece should be. Now I rarely use sketchbooks because I have combined the energy of my sketchbooks with the energy of my painting. Sometimes a painting gets cut up, in half, scraped down, torched, weathered, stepped on, cut, coated with wax or chopped into tiny little paintings. It is all part of trying to break my patterns and learn about the materials and tell stories and entertain myself and to go deep into the patterns that lie just behind my eyelids and tap into the crazy epic dreamer that I am. Continuity comes and goes. Style is elusive. Paint is a gift that is a non-linear narrative and I do not care what page I am on.
Theodore Holdt
ABOUT MY WORK
The first time I saw Michelangelo's David I was five years old. The second time I saw it I was thirteen and it shocked me because of how much it had shrunk. Michelangelo wrote - 'Whoever does not like the leaves ought not to come here in May.' Our story is about time, chronos, circular time. The size and shape of things change. Everything influences us, even in its absence.
Without the memories that I have developed through time I would be a child freshly born...no, I would be just-conceived. I am always building on this story and working toward the end of it, may it be death or forgetfulness. I end up spending a large portion of my time making things that seem to have little purpose like paintings, sculptures, masks, and music. I get absorbed in them and through them I sometimes brush up against that being that was before memory started...if memory started. It's like digging to find a hole.
Painting for me eats double exposed images with a camera and spilling mustard on the sidewalk and carving your name in a block of ice and licking the sweat of off your lovers thigh and tasting fresh fruit after a fast and singing into a well and dancing all night and going into a ceremony and mopping and playing the flute, and smashing rocks together to make rhythms to greet the Dali Lama, finding a sunny sleepy spot in the grass, crushing your toe with a dropped rock, the dust gathering on house plants, hummingbirds trapped in skylights, driving and throat singing… bouncing harmonics off of the windshield, singing into a looping machine, sex in the late morning with the sun coming in through the leaves of the big leaf maple casting hand print shadows on skin, chasing chickens through the yard, swinging in the hammock and inventing things to make living easier and less destructive.
Art swallows it all.
When I look back at my life I see many things. I see my childhood through the filter of now. I see the many different filters that I have passed through. Each one seems to be a less and more obscured way in which to be a gazing. While I am painting the paint becomes my filter, my teacher and my guide. I get to examine how I deal with the present moment. Like a tree root that struggles as it burrows into the earth. It cuts itself on sharp stones as it searches for nutrients and water...sustenance. As it grows it gets stronger and thicker. Over time it can break apart stone, lift houses and infiltrate water lines. Slow persistence. These tendrils of my progress reach out in all directions, into the dark, exploring and seeking nourishment. This is a personal “metaphor” for my process. But what of the product? Why value a painting? Sometimes it is not so clear. But I do value the shade of a large tree. I do value the strength of its branches as the rain and wind move them and make them dance. Without roots the tree is easily toppled. I find my strength to greet the day in the act of creating. I have spent time gazing at the wonder around me. In that gazing I have often found a the same quietness come over me that I experience in creating. To be in this awe is a gift that quiets my mind and allows for the song of the multiverse to creep in.
MINIATURE PAINTINGS IN THE “I AM HUNTING YOU ARE HUNTED SERIES”
I began painting miniatures a few years ago when I was snowed in for three weeks, in the Gorge where I live, in a house that I built with my partner. I was surprised by how big the spaces got and how my interest was held. I was even more surprised at how it felt to have ten of them. When I had painted one hundred of them I knew that something was happening. I have continued. I set a goal of 1000 for this show. I am now up to 1116 in my possession. That does not count the ones that I have sold, gifted, lost or the one that my friend found on the street outside his office one day on the sidewalk. Someone had stolen it and then lost it. These paintings are like little animals dissected, ground score fruit, honeycomb from my hives, naps. I am seeking them out and to finish one is to kill it and make it ready for consuming. “YOU” signifies not me, but does it really mean you? And what is “not me”? What is being hunted? I ask you to repeat you in your head fifty times and see how that makes you feel. You you you you you you you you you you you you……… Is it a chant, a cry of an animal, or the sound of something whizzing by your head? Close your eyes and feel it. What do you see? I see what I paint. I paint what I see. I paint you.
You are…. One thousand tiny worlds. In the beginning. Blocks of wood. Small illusions presented to be measured.
I am flying through star nebula looking for the center of my discomfort.
Playing with a live deck of cards. Keys to little worlds. Friends in my pockets. Ears and horns. Strange technology. Possible futures. Improbable picnics.Combined genetics. Science fiction. Tarot. Sacred texts leading to undiscovered science. Inedible foods. Short arms. Shells and wings. We are insects\Teeth need no sharpening. Wounds. Decapitation. Sweaters made from blood that are actually clean and cozy. My insides have become my outsides. Battles in the sky. Music made from live animals. Photos from the future. Tube worm sonatas. A red squid you can dance with. Shadow people angels are for atheists. Funny ducks distracting horned schoolboys. Erections. Fire breathing pandas arguing semantics. Softness. Serene heads of sexy things. Red dotted lands emptied of critters. Space ships. Vicious queens being presented with bloody bunnies. Normal animals. Twins. Snail dancers. Creatures on a cliff. Sentient objects grouping. Owl leather. Robot factories. Heads. Lots of heads. Temples to heads. Floating heads. Bowling with bubblegum. Lone house under a hill peopled by conjoined twins.
Solitary fruit. Boats. Cyborg café. Buttons on long coats. Toothy small critters in the yellow grass.
Rats playing trumpets. A green haze with a lone wispy flower. Eskimo. Eskimo. Inuit. My cloak has teeth and I am being tickled by worms. Red windows.
The roots of the tree in my stomach hide little people who tell me useful information that I can not share with you verbally.
She has a metal helmet on her head that keeps out the voices .
Bring your space suit to space.
Your hands are attached to your shoulder blades and have been mistaken for wings.
I am hunting. You are hunted. Protect this. Guard this. Wait here. Sit down. Look at this. I invite you in to my tiny house on the sharpened edge.
NOT PAINTING
Painting as a byproduct of a life, leavings, meanings, building blocks for awareness. Painting as an undoing, an unraveling, untying an unfishing.
Painting is a harvest or a regurgitation of a harvest.
Painting as unpainting, uncreating, not painting. Creating an image by destroying an image. Non intention.
Painting as a gobbler of time, a killer of the clock, a smasher of youth.
Painting to reminded me not to think of it, not to act on it, not to covet it, not to own it.
Painting to make me giggle when alone, to make me hate painting, to make me need painting, to make me avoid painting to make me paint too much.
Painting as technology, so amazing, faster than photoshop, slower than a mamothsickle. Painting as artificial intelligence or as real stupidity. Painting when I should be cleaning, eating, gardening, sleeping. Painting never interrupting cooking. Cooking is painting but painting is not cooking. I have painted in my sleep, on a bus, on a plane, in several countries, in altered states, but I have never painted underwater. One day I will paint underwater, oils, in an ocean.
OIL PAINT
I have a love relationship with oil paint. It is sexy and stubborn. It sometimes surprises me. I keep trying to do things with it that it tells me it does not want to do. It keeps teaching me its expanding boundaries and then changing overnight. I go to sleep with it staining my hands and face and in my hair when we are spending lots of time together. (sexy!) Paint follows all the rules of the knowable multiverse and I am using it to study…. it.
EXAMINATION OF PROCESS
Sketchbooks have always interested me. Most of the time they interest me more than the art people produce. I have noticed that there is something in the sketchbook that is more alive than in what most artists feel comfortable showing. I have been trying to, over the years, create an atmosphere with my painting panels of a sketchbook that has been torn apart and scattered all over the studio… exploded. Studies get painted over and scraped off and erased. In my early sketchbooks I would go back and forth through the pages adding something to a old drawing, gluing things in, painting over, taking notes, phone numbers, food, found objects glued to swelling pages. Finished “artwork” seemed to be a safer tamer more civilized place. Sketchbooks were always places for breaking the rules and putting down things I might not want people to see because it made me feel uncomfortable or because it did not fit into what I thought a finished piece should be. Now I rarely use sketchbooks because I have combined the energy of my sketchbooks with the energy of my painting. Sometimes a painting gets cut up, in half, scraped down, torched, weathered, stepped on, cut, coated with wax or chopped into tiny little paintings. It is all part of trying to break my patterns and learn about the materials and tell stories and entertain myself and to go deep into the patterns that lie just behind my eyelids and tap into the crazy epic dreamer that I am. Continuity comes and goes. Style is elusive. Paint is a gift that is a non-linear narrative and I do not care what page I am on.
Theodore Holdt