Bio
Holly Friesen was born in Saskatchewan, studied Visual Arts at John Abbott College in Montreal and painting at York University in Toronto. After many years of travel and study she settled in Mont-Tremblant, QC and opened ArtBeat Studio where she painted and taught for 15 years. Four summer seasons saw Holly as artistic director and curator of The Art Barn in Mont-Tremblant. The Art Barn was a collection of dynamic artists who worked and exhibited on location, an organic and creative venue that also hosted musicians, poetry readings, drummers, dancers and theater performances. In 2010 she also was curator and project manager of Ateliers du Village, an artist run gallery in Mont-Tremblant village. Her winters were spent painting in her Montreal studio where she eventually moved to paint full time in 2008. Holly’s passion is painting vibrant landscapes from the inside out while collaborating with other artists to make art more visible in our everyday world. |
Holly Friesen
Montreal/Quebec, Canada Curator at Art Bomb Artist Statement
My work revolves around earth-honoring images that reflect and instill connection to local bio-regions. These images internalize a reverence for the earth and shift the intent from harming the world to living in a mutually life enhancing manner. My practice seeks to reassert the validity of landscape painting as a vehicle that will ultimately address art’s potential role in the remediation of humanity’s disassociation from the natural environment. Landscape in western art has continually evolved as a cultural signifier mirroring humanity’s relationship to the earth. After thousands of years of conditioning, the modern psyche is radically alienated from the air, water and soil and we experience nature as "outside" our self and fail to recognize that the nature "out there" and the nature "in here" are one and the same. In The Voice of the Earth, an exploration of ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak points out an individual's harmony with his or her "own deep self" requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world. The deepest self cannot be confined to "in here" because we can’t be sure it is not also or even entirely "out there"! |