I am Hunting, You are Hunted
Over 1000 works by Theodore Holdt
October 1st - 30th, 2010Closing Reception
Saturday, October 30th, 2010, 3pm-6pm
with coffee, cookies, & time to talk to the artist about his process and work!
EASY Facebook event invite- tell a friend!
Read an insightful review of the show HERE
THEODORE HOLDT 1000 + PAINTINGSI AM HUNTING YOU ARE HUNTED
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.
Click the picture to go directly to the art!
ABOUT THE ARTIST, ABOUT THE SHOW
I have been living and working in Portland and the Columbia River Gorge since 1993. I am a oil painter, bee keeper, 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 can fix things and I often break things.
I AM HUNTING, YOU ARE HUNTED.
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.
Painting as
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.
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 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 know what page I am on.
theodore holdt
theodore holdt cv
website: http://wildskil.com
Check back for more images SOON… here’s .10% of the little ones…
ALL SMALL WORKS ARE $25 EACH, OR 5 FOR $100- Some may be sold already, so please inquire!
Selected Pieces
click thumbnail for a full-size view.
 theodore hold web card |
 devine chaos |
 game |
 IMG_4131 |
 self-sacrifice |
 white |
 0001 |
 0002 |
 0003 |
 0004 |
 0005 |
 0006 |
 0007 |
 0008 |
 0009 |
 0010 |
 0011 |
 0012 |
 0013 |
 0014 |
 0015 |
 0016 |
 0017 |
 0018 |
 0019 |
 0020 |
 0021 |
 0022 |
 0023 |
 0024 |
 0025 |
 0026 |
 0027 |
 0028 |
 0029 |
 0030 |
 0031 sold |
 0032 |
 0033 |
 0034 |
 0035 |
 0036 |
 0037 |
 0038 |
 0039 |
 0040 |
 0041 |
 0042 |
 0043 |
 0044 |
 0045 |
 0046 |
 0047 |
 0048 |
 0049 |
 0050 |
 0051 |
 0052 |
 0053 |
 0054 |
 0055 |
 0056 |
 0057 |
 0058 |
 0059 |
 0060 |
 0061 |
 Animation gallery tour |
 toy |
 through |
 skycatchers |
 sarcasm |
 river |
 redsquidlunch |
 peering |
 onscent |
 manyhands |
 look |
 cloying |
 anticipation |
 theodore holdt small works |
 The big wall |