This art is what happens when you grow up in the woods of
Kentucky with a photographic memory, going to a small private school in a
nearby town but living on a deep-rural farm with bookworm parents. You
end up reading Kipling as a toddler and Kafka as a pre-teen, and drawing
at an impossibly precocious age. I'm proud to say my style has
progressed very little since those formative years.
I don't disown my rural upbringing. I revel in it. There are those who
seek to whitewash all "primitive" aspects of rural life in the South,
even to the point of being offended at shows like "The Beverly
Hillbillies". These are the people who would homogenize Kentucky to the point of
being indistingushable from anywhere else. These are the people who
cannot abide the knowledge that I, Jethro, walk among them. They are the
enemy.
However, unlike some artists, neither do I rely on ruralness as a
gimmick. My art represents Kentucky life as parts of a greater whole, as
elements of an almost holographic construct, rather than relying on flat
cliches. I am not going to spend my life painting barns, covered
bridges, and cornfields for their own sake. These things tend to appear in the
backgrounds of paintings of things of far greater importance during my
rural upbringing: comic books. sex. music. food. Iconic imagery that
personifies the mysteries of nature and life that probably can only be
fully understood by those of us who entered puberty surrounded by haunted
wilderness.
I am omnivorous about my choice of materials. I have painted on canvas,
wood, paper, ceramic tiles, pegboard, china plates, rat traps, pizza
boxes, and anything within reach.
I am what some people would call a neo-expressionist, though I'm not
fond of anything that has a "neo-" attached to it. I declare that my art
is sincere and genuine, as opposed to the great deal of art out there
which seems to me to be soulless and fake. Any artist who paints what he
really wants to paint, and expresses what he really intends to express
is automatically beyond reproach.
My art is not for the jaded or the unenthusiastic.
Bernard Buffet said: "Painting, we do not talk about it, we do not
analyze it, we feel it." There it is, then. My paintings do not require the
viewer to read two pounds of text in order to be "truly understood" in
the "proper perspective".
Jeffrey Scott Holland
Your Email Comments Welcome
More About the Artist at http://www.jeffreyscottholland.com
