Where Land Meets Sea: Reflections of New Castle and Rye
During the summer of 2007, I began a series of landscape paintings exploring distinctive scenes around New Castle and Rye, New Hampshire. These small residential communities that overlook the Gulf of Maine afforded endless opportunities to study changes in light and color where land meets sea.
These images reveal the drama and subtlety of color as light shifts from morning to mid-day to night and land is reflected in water. In so doing, they evoke a reverence for both land and water. These paintings encourage viewers to experience the beauty of our natural world so as to cultivate a sense of respect and stewardship for it. Today, environmental stewardship has become essential not only to the quality of life in the seacoast of New Hampshire but to the survival of our planet.
To paint this series, I took a realist approach based on painting techniques of 19th century pre-impressionist painters. I began with pencil sketches and photographs of each scene as references and developed studio paintings using a classical layering technique that reveals the luminosity of our natural world.
Biographical Statement
Prior to becoming a painter, I was an education researcher and instructor. My research and publications focused on how making art transforms artists and communities. I documented how the arts provide strategies for reflecting on oneself and others; trying on others' voices; and creating new identities of our own. Inspired by this work, I left the world of education research and turned to my interest in painting.
From 2005-2008, I studied still-life, portrait, figure, and landscape drawing and painting at an atelier-style art academy in Boulder, CO. It was then that I began to find inspiration from Old Masters, American Impressionists, and contemporary realist painters. Since leaving art school, I have continued to pursue still-life and figure painting, but I spend the majority of my time trying to capture the quiet beauty of the coast of New Hampshire. In 2006, my husband and I began renovating a 100-year old barn in Rye, NH for our home and studio.
Having grown up on the outskirts of Exeter, New Hampshire, the quiet beauty of our rural environment always played an important role in my daily life. As a girl and later as a student of English at the University of New Hampshire, I attempted to recreate that sense of beauty in poems, stories, and essays. Now, as a painter, I strive to depict the experience of quiet beauty in my pictures. By focusing on the luminous yet subtle aspects of light and color and relying on an approach to composition and technique influenced by classical realism, my paintings aim to preserve images of quiet beauty as distillations of deeply felt experience over time.
Education
- Colorado Academy of Art, Foundation Program, Boulder, CO, 2005-2008
- Ph.D, University of Colorado at Boulder; 2001
- MA, University of New Hampshire; 1993
- BA, University of New Hampshire; 1988
- St. Paul's School, Concord, NH, 1984
Publications
- Holloway, D.L. and Krensky, B. (2001). "Introduction: The Arts, Urban Education, and Social Change." Education and Urban Society, 33, (4), 354-365.
- Holloway, D.L. and LeCompte, M.D. (2001). "Becoming Somebody! How Arts Programs Support Positive Identity for Middle School Girls." Education and Urban Society, 33, (4), 388-408.
- Holloway, D.L. (2001). Authoring Identity and Agency through the Arts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Colorado, Boulder.