User talk:Vogemudet

The following is from Lawrence Hollien's website with his permission. I do not know him personally.

Lawrence Hollien : An artist who paints in a surreal and neo-classical mode using narrative and mythology in a historically informed body of work.

Dear Friends, Welcome to L Hollien On-Line the Official Lawrence Hollien homepage, dedicated to you, my friends all over the world. Here you will always find the latest news regarding my current activities and new works. Some websites have me listed as a computer artist..I am not. I do not own Photoshop nor do I make collages.. These are either hand drawn with a pen & ink set or painted in oils on panels or canvas.

I have provided accompanying texts to explain the meaning of the pictures. Viewing paintings on line is, I realize, problematic.The quality of the images will differ widely from screen to screen due to variations in hardware, servers, etc. Still, because each painting is about information and ideas more than anything else, I see this kind of presentation, despite its technical drawbacks, as essentially positive.

I make paintings that are on some levels anachronistic, that is, out of their supposed historical order. I believe in allowing myself to time travel, to wander freely through history rather than being inflexibly attached to the present. This does not mean, however, that I reject modern or contemporary art. I do not. Contemporary art and social values inform the way that I interpret and use historical art.

I am a Northern California artist. My landscape paintings are a celebration of the natural beauty of my surroundings -- the hills around Monterey and Salinas. The style of my work is drawn from the great traditions of Western painting and speaks in a time-honored and accessible manner. While Italian art informs my painting style, other more complex elements in my work show a blending with contemporary experience to form an expression that is uniquely "contempo-italianate." The illusion of depth is achieved by following the laws of perspective first used by Florentine Renaissance artists such as Brunelleschi and Masaccio. By introducing objects from different time periods, ranging from ancient to contemporary, I set up a dynamic of traveling across historical time. By melding disparate cultural references into each painting, the paintings invite the viewer into a contemplative moment of nostalgia for the past and reverence for the forefathers of Italian art. One of the traditions I honor is the Florentine ideal of "harmonic integration" a theory relating the human figure to an architectural or civic environment. In the painting Gentle Harbor Twilight, I added tension between the accuracy of the painting of some actual boats and the addition of a grape kool-aid colored ocean and of a large moon above the harbor -- a fiction somewhat of my invention. Because the harbor is so well known as a popular site for tourists, I found it to be the most logical location of the shock of seeing a larger-than-life moon, that appears for three days in the Fall in that quadrent of the sky, most of the time it is overcast at that time, it is evidence to the ubiquity of representations of this familiar subject. Adding a further twist to the work, I have postcards made of this painting and display them in racks adjacent to the piece, highlighting the current function of the Monterey Harbor-an outdoor shopping mall for tourists in search of souvenirs and mementos of Monterey. Wharf boat paintings and drawings are my form of honoring Cubism. While Caravaggio and his followers portrayed figures of their time possessing ardent moral certainty, my figures, who seem just as passionate and emotionally charged, are placed in a context of doubt and ambiguity more characteristic of contemporary experience.In contrast to the seriousness of the work created by those artists who first studied the laws of perspective, my work is playful and lively and introduces the modern Duchampian view of art in which the viewer's interaction completes the picture.

The Hollien Family owned a Chicken Ranch turned into a Dog Kennel in White Plains, New York. I studied under my Father who was in the Construction Trade in New York and Las Vegas, he gave me an architectural sense of the world. My Father built 1,000 to 2,000 unit homes and the Stardust. Growing up we knew many famous people, my Dad would say "you knew them all".

I have various card companies that represent my work as well as Galleries.

They said that they knew the work would sell and that they had printed 250,000 of each of the five images and that normally they do a tester batch of 15,000. So that was a million and a quarter to start. They have been selling for 14 years now in Longs, Kmart's, Post Offices, California Missions and Gift Shops up and down California.

I had a painting instructor named David Ligare when I was 17-20 years of age.

Then many years later I was employed as the "Painting & Sketch Set-Up Guy" for Richard MacDonald the Sculptor when I was 32-33. I asked for his help but Richard told me that he "expects me to be his competition in the future, the cream always rises to the top. " That's one of the best compliments that I have received.

I started my fine arts painting as a surrealist but quickly felt that the visual language of surrealism was to atavistic for the modern world, too reliant on visual structures and styles that while beautiful were out of touch with the flavor and sensibilities of today’s world. Sort of like trying to describe a punk rock concert while writing in Elizabethan English. However expertly this could be done, to me a new age and new experiences needs a new language. Though I continue to use realism as my technical framework, I am trying to evolve in my work a new and autonomous visual language that represents my ideas in today’s society. Postmodern Surrealism and Neo-Classicism is for me in it's infancy. It is a direction which I can feel just out in front of me. The work I am producing now feels very authentic and on track in this new direction, but for me this direction is just beginning to take shape and each of my recent pieces has been a baby step. Humans realized the magnitude of disorder in the world and their capacity to control the environment was fundamentally challenged. The classical was never intended to represent things as they are. In fact the meaning was generated by how different the classical interior was from chaos out there. It was a proposal of what could be. Its basis in faith -faith in human reason. It represented, quite deliberately, an ideal. It had no misconceptions about the reality of its surroundings -war, pestilence, plague...It offered hope. It offered an oasis of order in the desert of chaos and an island of comprehension in a sea of confusion.. L Hollien On-Line is located here: http://lawrencehollien.com

Speedy deletion of Lawrence Hollien
A tag has been placed on Lawrence Hollien requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person or group of people, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not indicate the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, as well as our subject-specific notability guideline for biographies.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. CultureDrone (talk) 18:31, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Lawrence Hollien
A tag has been placed on Lawrence Hollien requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person or group of people, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not indicate the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, as well as our subject-specific notability guideline for biographies.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. chiefhuggybear (talk) 00:00, 12 July 2008 (UTC)