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Jeffrey Scott Holland was born in Madison County, Kentucky, in 1966. He began drawing, reading and writing before he could even walk,
and was determined by Eastern Kentucky University to be an extraordinarly gifted child with a photographic memory. This got him into
Model Laboratory School, which at that time was a K-12 semi-private school known for its progressive and experimental education techniques.
Holland's earliest artwork as a child consisted of handmade comic books, made by folding several sheets of notebook paper in half, and stapling them
together along the fold to create the book's spine. The earliest of these extant is Gertie Ghost #2, drawn in 1968 at the age of two and inspired in part
by the monster characters in DC's Super-Hip comics.
By the early 1980s he was a full-fledged fine art painter working in a primarily abstract style that utilized dense patterns of runic symbols and automatism-like squiggles;
perfectly in line with other art going on at the time, but with a simultaneously deeper sense of mystery and meaning than Basquiat's repetitions of non-sequiturs and
Haring's gaudily decorative patterns. These 1980s works are highly sought after today. He briefly attended the Atlanta Institute of Art but dropped out almost as soon as he had begun,
unhappy with the modern art world's growing emphasis on nontraditional forms of art such as conceptual art, video art, found objects, etc. This same determined allegiance to painting was echoed years later
At the peak of his success, however, Holland vanished out of sight for several years, living what he termed a "Kerouacian" existence of traveling, bumming around, and living marginally. During this time, he still produced art as well as chapbooks of writing, but gave almost all of it away. Some pieces were left in phone booths, public restrooms, or on park benches, and amazingly, some have survived and resurfaced later. Holland also experimented in the world of Mail Art during these years, working with greats like Ray Johnson and Ryosuke Cohen. Holland returned to civilization in the early 1990s and refocused on his fine art career. Since then, he has produced an enormous body of work, sold well over one thousand works, and exhibited in group and solo exhibitions around the world. The primal expressiveness of his techniques, coupled with the deceptively simple presentation of his subjects, may lead the casual viewer to glance quickly and move on. Those who do are missing the point. The iconic images represented in Holland's work are key to the bigger picture: his somewhat mysterious and idiosyncratic personal philosophy of "Invisible Topography" (which is the subject of a soon-to-be-published book).
Holland's own favorite artists include Bernard Buffet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Billy Childish, Gary Panter, Vincent Van Gogh, Walt Kelly, Gen Paul, Charles Burns, Otto Dix and Georges Rouault. He isn't fond of terms like "outsider art" or "folk art" because, in his own words: "most people's preconceptions of what those terms mean don't really apply to me. I'm more aligned with German Expressionism of the 1920s and the Neo-expressionism of the 1980s, although I don't like being relegated to those boxes either". So what does he like to call his art? "Jeffrey Scott Holland paintings".
Top image: Butchertown Serenade, acrylic on canvas, 2006. |
when Holland became an early adopter of the historic Stuckism movement, which parlayed their disdain for postmodernism into an art genre unto itself.
What's next for Jeffrey Scott Holland? We asked, and he replied:
"I'd like to be the first artist to hold an exhibition of their
work on one of Neptune's moons". Why not our own Moon? "It's been done".