Hollis Moore is an assistant printer and instructor at Oehme GRAPHICS. She earned her MFA at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO, and has been an outdoor educator for the National Outdoor Leadership School in Ranikhet, India, and the Road Less Traveled in Ecuador. Her passion for cultural and environmental conservation combined with her incredible talent for printmaking bring a rare purity and beauty to her work. Make sure to add Holly’s work to your collection while you can!

Artist Statement: “Constructed in oil paint or reductive, woodcut print, tangled marks and textures intertwine as they move from one piece to another. Some lines in my work regress into a projected plane while others project sharply towards the viewer. The colors are atmospheric. They represent a landscape, invoking memories of a place and time in the natural world. As individual compositions, my pieces feel harmonious and peaceful. When installed as a group of repetitive prints the scale engulfs the viewer into an abstraction. The relationship between colors; immediate, layered, or isolated, assimilate my theme.

In my work, I draw plants largely because my intricate mark-making imitates woven grasses. Bold lines and soft scribbles resemble a network of plant growth. My perception of Colorado’s high alpine ecology is constantly changing depending on the land’s response to environmental and cultural variables like season, climate, conservation, and agriculture. In effect, my work expresses a curiosity about how other people interact with the environment as I build my own deep connection with the natural world.

Intrigue in color accumulates as I oil paint quickly on paper to map my surroundings. A grounding in traditional drawing and painting underly my gestural and intuitive sketches, which I produce in the field. The experience of painting en plein air organizes and shapes the sensibility and ideas within the composition, with the goal to “harvest” honest color representations. Constantly, I look to expand my color literacy.

Traditional Japanese techniques and trial and error investigations of relief and monotype printmaking allow the invention of many planes within each composition. I question how diversities of values, transparency, and opacity affect layers of complimentary colors. Every technical decision I make converses with an earlier or subsequent color. Areas of clarity, created by calculated woodcut reductions balance monoprinted smudges. By working in a square format and on multiple blocks, my prints become a grid to weave marks, similar to how branches and stems entwine. I also enact the freedom to use plates as a warp and weft. Comprised of many layers, my method of contrasting complimentary colors and integrating analogous colors abstracts concepts about the environment”.

To learn more about Hollis and her work, visit www.hollislmoore.com