Hadley Holliday was born in Kansas City and currently lives in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from California Instituteof the Arts in 2004. Her paintings explore a collision of geometric abstraction, ritual experimentation, broken systems, forgotten rules, mistakes and play. Her work can be seen online at www.hadleyholliday.com and at Taylor de Cordoba Gallery, www.taylordecordoba.com
Artist Statement: Over the past year or so I have been working on drawing all the flowers from every art object at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The drawings travel across times and cultures, exploring the deeply human urge both to decorate and to symbolize complex emotions through simple forms. The project sprang from my work as a Teaching Artist at the museum where I have led many classes focused on drawing in the galleries. Ive noticed that not only are flowers the most frequent motif throughout the history of art, floral imagery has been used to represent every aspect of human emotion and experience from passion to loss, wealth to mortality, transcendence, rebirth, femininity, clan affiliation, natural order, paradise, transformation, longing…
Back in my studio I use the drawings to generate a series of cyanotype paintings – solar photograms using local natural materials such as sand and plant debris to work photographic images and textures into the shapes of the flowers. I really love reflecting on the role of light in painting, by making work that has both the illusion of light and shadow, and is literally made with sunlight.
Holliday’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Acme, Taylor de Cordoba, Carl Solway Gallery and SolwayJones. Holliday teaches drawing and painting at College of the Canyons, LBCC, LACMA and the California State Summer School for the Arts.
Hadley Holliday
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