Holly Olive is a Colorado-based painter.  She was born in North Dakota, but has lived in a wide range of landscapes from the Mojave Desert to New England.  The mother of two has lived coast to coast in the United States and also 2 years in Italy.  This variety of landscapes is evident in the paintings she creates today.  Holly is a self-taught lifelong painter.  During covid, she took measure to look at what her expectations were for herself and her art.  Her childhood was a convoluted narrative of a middle child with learning disabilities who struggled mightily in school.  She was a girl who loved to create imaginative worlds on her easel, but had never shown her art to the public.  Today you can find Holly painting daily in her home studio, setting fire to the negative cloak of her youth.

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Inspired by dreams of altered worlds and landscapes, my paintings embody the movement and color of an alternate universe.  Using acrylic and alcohol ink, I create abstract landscapes of a world that is just outside my reach.  Casting out my brush as if it were a wizard’s wand in unpredictable strokes to inflict a   visual experience that stimulates the mind to ask “What world is this?”  I use a palette knife with an intentional splat to cleave into the fabric of time and space.  I work back and forth, layer to layer, until I verge on falling from the precipice to a new precious universe.