The World of Loren Holland

“My goal in making a painting is to get people to look at it and maybe see something they didn’t know before and want to keep looking at it until they see something else, and keep looking at it until they get what they can get from it.” Loren Holland on painting 09-09-08.

Loren Holland’s demure presence appears antithetical to the self-assured young women she conjures in her paintings. I’ll describe them in 24 words: Brown-hued female exoticas ensconced in a world of allegories, symbolism, contradictions and mythos; confident and coy, maybe a bit beguiling, and definitely seductive. Seduction is a complex skill that, from a personal perspective, requires one to be competent in their manipulation, yet vulnerable to the outcome and can play out anywhere from the boardroom to the bars or, in Loren Holland’s paintings. So yes Loren, you have achieved your goal in making a painting. I look and I see something I didn’t know before and I want to keep looking until I’ve gotten all I can from it.

Loren Holland graciously agreed to this interview one week before five paintings were to be shipped out to the Oakland Museum’s "L.A. Paint "exhibition due to open October 4. At the time, her paintings were almost complete and to top it off, she had recently moved into her Long Beach studio from New York City. Stacks of sketches and notes were strewn about the arsenal of materials in a painter’s studio – pallets of fresh oil paint, open containers of thinner, saturated brushes, oily rags, i.e., the usual suspects. One painting (Death by Water) lay on the floor, three on the wall and the fifth, out of my view.

There’s much abuzz about this young MFA Yale graduate’s paintings which are filled with a juicy smorgasbord of content for critics, art historians, and cultural theorists to intellectually munch. Her work she says “is all about recontextualizing images. I work with stereotypes and social realities that we are living and I try to distort those expectations by taking them out of context. And I work with allegory and satire so symbolic imagery can direct the viewer toward certain ideas or themes. I try and undermine their original purpose and change the association with what people think, what you normally expect. The theme in this quintet of paintings is working to actively change one’s environment. Loren quotes the time honored adage: “if you got lemons, make lemonade."

The painting below, "Death by Water" best illustrates this ethic. Loren describes it as "a very Katrina-like scene with objects floating and a house submerged in the background. This one has to do with two things, making the best of a really bad situation and working with what you got. So, her city is underwater, everything is ruined, everything is floating around, and there's going to be some other plants in there and there's a lot of water, so she's gonna go surfing. The water also references the wasteland."

Loren Holland, the artist is very clear on what she wants her paintings to convey but is open to viewers surmising their own conclusions, albeit, with her direction. “I don’t want free for all interpretations because this is already loaded imagery and I try not to perpetuate stereotypes. I don’t want people to conclude, ‘oh, yeah, that’s just how these black women are.’” A contradiction? Maybe. But if guiding viewer interpretation leads to questioning negative stereotypes and revising associations for greater human understanding then I say, GO FOR IT!

Her process. Gumbo is the word that comes to mind when I think about Loren’s pre-painting process. More time is spent in the preparation than the actual cooking. Everything is very preconceived. She gets an idea and then does “tons of writing. I write out everything, just pages and pages of notes and thoughts and I lay it out like an outline, and then I’ll go through that again and reflect back and then when I write it out again, I write it out as a proposal.

Then I’ll make tons of little sketches, edit, change and add color.” Loren combs through pages and pages of magazines to find the right images for her sketching, sometimes morphing two pictures together. The female image in “Unreal City” is a blend between Beyonce and a model from another magazine. The “jungle-lush” landscapes are created from pictures of Amazonian Rainforests. Finally she creates the under-sketches for the paintings and collages the content on the canvas which she describes as a Bearden-esque type of process. The act of painting makes the collaging seamless and unifies the composition. The end result: an imaginary landscape of coded images that act as context clues for the viewer to decipher meaning. And remember, Loren Holland’s meaning is all about recontextualizing the image to “debunk stereotypes and distort expectations.”

Loren completed her MFA from Yale in 2005 and started showing at Anna Kustera in NYC even before she was awarded her diploma. In 2007 she had her first solo show at the Santa Monica Museum’s project room. While most of her classmates made the mad exodus to New York after graduating, Loren returned to sunny California and rented a studio in Long Beach. Perhaps Loren is the pioneer for starting a westward migration for younger artists who want to make their mark in the art world. The weather is certainly better and it’s a tad cheaper.

The three images below and the two above are the completed paintings that Loren will feature in the Oakland Museum's "L.A. Paint" exhibition. (Oct. 4 opening.) Her explanation of each is below.

(Top) " 'The Unseen Presence' has to do with a typical mulatto-ish image who is actively trying to change her environment. And rather than have the viewer fall upon what they may normally associate with a woman who looks like that -- a sex object, a video vixen, a mother with a baby, violence, bad credit or any stuff like that -- she is trying to clean it up, she's doing something that you wouldn't normally expect. And I want to put a green twist on it too and introduce the theme where everything gets recycled."

(Middle) " 'Unreal City' references T.S. Elliot's Wasteland. But it has to do with imagery and media expectations, the black woman and ideals of beauty being lighter with straight hair. Her nails are manicured and she has bleached peroxide hair. But it's really about garbage. That's why she's in this wasteland metropolis."

(Bottom) " 'The Orchid Gardener' has to do more with expectations of success, but more conventional. She's got things like a little box that associates with marriage, good luck, education, everything associated with doing well in life. And hopefully you won't get undermined and that's where the orchids come in as a symbol; they are so strong and will go through anything and they are typically thought of as exotic and beautiful."