Eric Holzman: Studio Visit
In trying to get the ego out of his paintings, to be more of a craftsman, Eric Holzman has been looking at the Italian painters right before the Renaissance, especially Piero della Francesca. "I've been wanting less of the artist in the work and more of the subject," he says. "Ever since cubism, the metal part has been emphasized and I've been trying to get away from that. So much modern art is ironical and that's not what I'm interested in. That's why some people have trouble with my work. It's not ironical."
He's at work on a large portrait but what stands out in his studio are two landscapes that, it turns out, he did in Italy outside of Tuscany. The land is lush, furrowed and plowed, and the rounded hills, like slow waves breaking, are frozen in the motion of spring's budding rituals. The space is dramatic as the ridge of a foreground hill intersects the expanding valley far below. There's a sense of the Italian primitivists like the Lorenzettis and the Siennese school. The picture space is as thrillingly persuasive as in the paintings and altarpieces of those 13th-century innovators. Eric's paintings share the excitement of their discovery of how to render depth and to free figures from an architectural interpretation that formerly could only flatten depth against the picture plane. The paintings pulsate with dimension and fluency. It's like a view into prehistory.
We're watching him blending colors on a sheet of glass trying to duplicate a color in a study for the large portrait he's working on. "What I've been picking up from the Italians is an evenness of an attack. In this painting, wherever the surface built up, I scraped it. I was painting my way down and here [pointing to throat] I got hold of it better . . . I'm in a pretty good mood. My color is getting better. The color is up and the stroke down. I'm relaxing away from a rigid technique. I'm trying to get away from something and am trying some alternatives . . . I'm finding some sort of balance between what's out there and the painter's style. Piero says to me, 'It's OK, kid. Just have an empathy for the subject.' Lately, Soutine has looked good to me. He didn't make his intellect such a part of the painting."
He pulls out a painting from a rack and puts it on the wall. "I finished this one last year but if I kept it hanging up I'd start to rework it. I'm compulsive about it. This portrait I'm working on now is a second version. Here's the first. Rudy [Burckhardt, a painter/filmmaker friend] came in and said it was my best painting. Then a friend of [wife's] Annie's, who isn't even a painter, came in and said something and that seemed right so I started to rework it . . ."
(Say, November, 1986)