MH: These small dioramas (twelve by twelve by twelve inches) are in my studio, where I can study them not necessarily to make paintings from but to think about. In a way, they are cruel––I am confining these sculptural, almost human beings; yet also, observing light reflections on glass, distortions, and background shapes. The cloches set things apart, creating separate environments that are made significant by their detachment.

The paintings you listed came from studying how light and transparency works in these glass containers and imagining landscapes in them. Sometimes the space of the contained landscapes is deeper than the space or room where they reside.

As for the imagery, it starts with vague sketches in my sketchbook. I wanted a break from figures as a studio project, since invented figures had been my main subject for more than a decade. Most of the imagery in these new paintings are supplemented by observation from nature, botanical illustrations, and gardening.

EJ: The bell jar “device,” let’s call it, mixes 2-D and 3-D, and it seems significant that you use limitation, a controlling vessel, to picture activity. The bell jar pieces also conflate what's attached to the glass with what's contained. What freedoms and restrictions does the format offer you?

MH: It began as a test: could I create a space within and simultaneously contend with what happens on the shiny surface, as well as the distortions of glass? And what could happen outside the bell jar/cloche?

EJ: Your pieces seem to mesh the cool removal of scientific or narrative inquiry with playful display. Does your anthropomorphic mean joining a landscape exterior with human feeling or interior? perhaps signaling being half natural and half human?

MH: Yes, I think you have grasped it. In developing the “color blobs” that are the starting point for the flora of my paintings, the sense of human movement is instrumental to their progression, position, and interactions of flowers, leaves, branches, stones, etc. These could be viewed as scenes for some sort of story. My earlier Young Marie work directed the narrative, whereas with this work the narrative is open-ended and implied.

EJ: I share your admiration for Rococo and Fragonard. In The Library recalls the garden statuary in his love scenes, and feels especially mysterious: fabric conceals a background, the horses are liver spotted, the mirror seems to prophesy. It's complete, hermetic. What’s your take on this piece?

MH: It has personal history, and I think it is the impetus for much of this work. At my mother’s 99th birthday party, I was standing in front of her mantle, a memory and feeling that is very vivid after many years. I wasn’t thinking about anything specific while standing there other than simply looking at a vase of two horse heads. When I was cleaning out her house, I took it to the thrift store and have regretted it since. The memory of this vase began to obsess me, I tried to find the same one on eBay, but I realized I did not clearly remember it. In my search I stumbled on other horse-themed vases, including a double horse one, and I began collecting images of these vases. The image is loosely based on these double horse vases...

MH: The flowers are not unlike “thought bubbles,” which may be overwhelmed by all the ideas we may have.

The flowers begin as color blobs that frequently simulate vicarious movement.

Formality, Picnic, Merlin, and Stein are part of my Diminutives series. The containers are intentionally small, doll size. I find there is a feeling when I hold these impossibly tiny objects of this size that I cannot verbalize but it engages and intrigues me. As part of this series, I have been making small paintings (fourteen by eleven inches) of these really tiny objects.

Perhaps it has something to do with “meta”? Setting on a well-used piece of cloth draped over a shelf between two walls, Merlin illustrates the clash of thought and actualities, as the elaborate flower arrangement grows out of an illogically small glass container reminiscent of a laboratory vessel.

EJ: Considering Rachel Ruysch and Otto Marseus van Schrieck, the two 17th century Dutch painters you mention in your Artist Statement: Does the Dutch style of obscuring items behind other items in complicated compositions and relishing plenty to the point that the whole outweighs individual parts dovetail with your use of cloche or bell jars and mysterious drapery?

MH: In my painting Fondly, the tendrils, vines, and leaves of the inside arrangement partially obscure the background landscape as seen through the window behind the cloche, as do the surface reflections. Surface reflections hide parts of that landscape in the background, suggesting that the landscape elements are inside the cloche, an ambiguity I embrace. Picnic and Stein form a shadow-like shield of middle ground on top of the background blocking our view, reading as an opaque or a semi-transparent shadowy area. 

I don’t know what is behind the curtains in paintings like In The Library and Ever So: they were mainly the result of necessity, the space needed to be divided. I embrace their mystery and the possibilities they present for future work.

EJ: You mention that you admire the palettes and inventiveness of Inka Essenhigh and Lisa Yuskavage. You seem to use a jewel-like palette centered on deep purple, red, green, and blue, as opposed to painting flowers and plants in daylit colors. Would you consider your palette as evocative of internal thought more than realistic exteriors?

MH: Yes, I am not trying to paint realistic exteriors or lighting. I love color and have jumped into it with both feet after several years of using a very limited palette in the Young Marie series.

My color is rarely preplanned except to exclude colors I feel have become a crutch. The palettes of these two painters and their paint handling are so lush, masterful, and inventive.

About the Artist

Marilyn Holsing lives and works in Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, including, The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, Delaware; Melanee Cooper Gallery in Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania and Field Projects, New York. Her work is included in public collections such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Woodmere Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Fidelity Investments. She is Professor Emerita in painting at Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

___

“An Ohioan by birth, I have lived and worked in the Philadelphia area for decades, moving here to teach at Tyler School of Art after graduate school. My undergraduate degree (BFA) is from the Ohio State University and my graduate degree (MA) is from the University of New Mexico. I retired as Professor of Painting a few years ago, but I have continued to work in the studio in a variety of media. My practice has branched out into new directions, such as dioramas, while continuing my commitment to painting.

In these years I have lived in the city followed by a move to the suburbs. One of the joys of life in the suburbs is the opportunity to garden. Not only do I grow flowers and shrubs, but I like re-designing the plantings, interests that reveal themselves in my studio work.”