Loie Hollowell's: Transcendent Bodies | Art21 "New York Close Up"

How do you paint a pregnancy?

Painter Loie Hollowell creates highly abstracted and yet deeply personal representations of the human body, evoking our universal experiences of sensuality, desire, pleasure, and pain. A California native, Hollowell works with a vocabulary of elemental, organic shapes and renders them in vibrant, high-contrast color, evoking the “pure light, pure space, [and] pure emotion” of creative heroes like Robert Irwin and other California-based Light and Space movement artists.

Returning to her Ridgewood, Queens studio after her second pregnancy, Hollowell and her assistants build up sinuous forms directly upon the surface of her canvases. For Hollowell, this strategy transforms the works from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional hanging sculptures, upon which she can play with real and illusory light, space, and shadow. The physicality of the surfaces is echoed in the abstracted imagery that Hollowell paints upon them including reproductive organs, breasts, and other bodily forms. The artist candidly recounts the corporeal memories that have informed her work: her mother letting down in public shortly after Hollowell’s younger sister was born, the artist’s experience with abortion in her twenties, and the mental preparation for and experience of giving birth to her second child. Although often regarded as taboo, Hollowell is driven to make work about these bodily experiences all the while questioning her own creative desires and assumptions. “What is beauty and why is it beautiful?” asks the artist.

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, Woodland, California, USA) lives and works in New York, New York. Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/loie-hollowell/

This film is among a collection that comprise Art21's participation in the multi-institutional Feminist Art Coalition initiative. Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) is a platform for art projects informed by feminisms, fostering collaborations between arts institutions that aim to make public their commitment to social justice and structural change.

CREDITS | "New York Close Up" Series Producer: Nick Ravich. Director & Editor: Anna Barsan. Camera: Rose Bush. Sound: Rose Bush and Anna Barsan. Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, and Ryan J. Raffa. Color Correction: Addison Post. Sound Design & Mix: Gisela Fullà-Silvestre. Design & Graphics: Andy Cahill and Chips. Artwork Courtesy: Loie Hollowell. Archival Media: Artbound / KCET, City of Huntington Beach, Sharon Mollerus, and United States Navy. Thanks: Alicia Adamerovich, Brian Caverly, Linden Caverly, Felix (studio cat), Juniper Hollowell, Pace, Dan Perkins, and Hannah Root. © Art21, Inc. 2021. All rights reserved.

"New York Close Up" is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; Dawn and Chris Fleischner; and by individual contributors.

#LoieHollowell #Art21 #Art21NewYorkCloseUp

A lot of times in my paintings

you might see a shape that looks like a vagina,

but upon closer inspection, it might also be

a penis with balls.

You know, I don't know how much of 
this you're going to want to put in.

My work is an expression of my core sensuality.

I'm a body experiencing desire,

experiencing pleasure.

It is sensual and needy

and dirty and expressive.

I'm a body that is pregnant,

but isn't necessarily

the woman or the pregnant body 
that society may put onto me.

I'm experiencing pleasure and 
pain that anyone can experience,

and that's what I'm putting into the work.

["Loie Hollowell's Transcendent Bodies"]

It's nine months later.

I've had my baby at home, Juniper.

She's now six months old.

I gave birth in the pandemic.

And I'm back in the studio.

And some things have changed in the world.

I think around the age of seven or eight

my dad gave me my own studio.

It was a closet.

He set me all up in there with a little easel

and a fresh canvas.

I can remember the space so clearly.

To have my own room next to my dad's

and next to my mom's was pretty transformative.

I've always centered myself 
back into painting and drawing

because of him giving me that space so early on.

Color and light are central 
characters in my painting practice.

When I look at my work over the years,

there's just this real 
strong sense of chiaroscuro--

light to dark forming space.

I grew up in California surrounded 
by Light and Space artists.

Robert Irwin and his beautiful discs,

with this line in between.

Experiencing pure light,

pure space,

pure emotion.

There's always that hunting,

that searching for a light-filled experience,

even if it's a dark subject matter,

or an undescribable subject matter.

Around my late twenties, I got pregnant

and I did not want to keep the baby.

I had an abortion.

Planned Parenthood was amazing and wonderful.

The emotional experience

and the fallout of the relationship 
was pretty emotionally intense.

I wanted to figure out how 
to make paintings about it.

I started making, basically, 
portraits of my vagina and ovaries,

trying to depict the experience 
of having the abortion.

I realized the abstraction can hold within it

that sensation or that emotion

by its color, its composition,

its texture.

When I started diving deep into

creating three-dimensional spaces on my paintings,

I was now having to deal with

illusory space and real space--

constructed shadow and constructed light

versus real light and real shadow.

--Issues we've had with this milling 
before is they haven't had enough layers on

--and you've seen the mill lines come through.

--So recently, Alicia has 
been putting more layers on.

--That's what I'm feeling right now,

--when you close your eyes 
and you feel that consistent,

--smooth texture.

--That's it!

--Yup, this one is good!

What I've found that I love 
about having a painting

that in reality is a sculpture

is that it changes within each context,

within each space that it's hung.

A transition really happened for me when

the governor put the stay-at-home order in place.

I was about to give birth also,

so I brought a bunch of 
pastels and pastel paper home

and just started drawing at home.

I was trying to visualize my second birth,

of my daughter,

and move into that space somehow

to start accepting the pain.

Like, the insane place that your brain goes.

So I was making drawings of my brain space

and my belly space

and the opening of my cervix.

Those drawings are leading me into this new path.

I'm beginning to actually take casts

that I made of myself when I was pregnant,

and friends of mine when they've been pregnant,

and putting them onto the surface of the painting.

When I start feeling really stuck in one place,

I need to change,

and that's where I'm seeing 
and demanding the shift

of geometric, simple shapes

into the reality of my body.

After my mom had given birth to my second sister,

we were at a gas station

and I was in the back seat of the car.

I remember watching her fill up the gas tank.

Her shirt started being covered with water.

I was like, "What is going on?"

And she was leaking--

she was letting-down--

because my sister was crying next to me.

Her shirt was being covered in milk.

There's these little things that we 
can buy to prevent that from happening.

But that was such a beautiful experience

and it's something that I want to make art about.

Really having the space to question 
what it is I'm making and why

has really put all of these things

I felt that I had language for

into question.

"Why bright colors?"

"Why high contrast?"

"Why geometric forms?"

I think these are all questions,

as artists, we have to continue to ask ourselves.

"Why are we doing what we're doing?"

"What is beauty?"

"And why is it beautiful?"

"And what makes beauty?"