Erik Holland: Four Decades Painting Nevada en Plein Air

Part of The Artist Archive, Viridian Eclection's research library of artist biographies and signatures. See also the artist page and the Signature Index.

A Reno painter who has spent more than four decades standing in front of Nevada with a loaded brush: the training, the newspaper years, the building portraits of Austin, Ely and Eureka, the signature, and how to read his canvases.

Most painters of the American West work from photographs, from memory, or from the comfortable distance of a studio. Erik Holland works from the shoulder of the road. For more than forty years he has carried an easel into the sagebrush, onto the main streets of Nevada mining towns and up to the faded motel signs of downtown Reno, and painted what was in front of him before the light changed. The result is one of the most sustained painted records of Nevada made by a single living artist: Great Basin ridges and valleys, wild horses, storm skies, and hundreds of portraits of courthouses, hotels, saloons and storefronts, many of them in towns most Nevadans have only driven through.

He is also a cartoonist, a former small town newspaper reporter, a muralist, a teacher and, since 2000, a fixture of the Riverside Artist Lofts in downtown Reno. This article gathers what the published record says about him, flags where accounts differ, and sets out what a collector should know about his signature and his work.

Chicago, and the Blank Spaces on the Map

Holland's biographical material gives his birthplace as Detroit; every press account we found describes him as raised in, or a native of, Chicago, and it is Chicago that shaped him. A 2019 KUNR Youth Media profile reports that he began drawing at about the age of nine, sketching buildings along Stony Island Avenue on the city's South Side. The interest in architecture never left. Decades later he told Our Town Reno simply, "I love architecture."

Nevada entered his imagination early, as an absence. Introducing a 2017 exhibition, the Nevada Press Association quoted him recalling a Chicago childhood in which "I used to stare at the blank spaces in the map." Nevada, he said, was one of them.

His formal training spans three institutions on two coasts and in between: the Art Students League of New York, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (where Reno News & Review and Artspace report he studied for one year after high school), and the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. A 2006 Nevada Appeal profile states instead that he studied art and history at San Francisco State University. We have not been able to reconcile the two accounts and record both here; it is possible he attended both San Francisco schools.

First Crossing: 1979

Holland first saw central Nevada in 1979, driving west from Chicago on US Route 50, the highway later branded "the Loneliest Road in America." Speaking to This Is Reno in 2014, he put it plainly: "I first saw Eureka in 1979 when I came west from Chicago."

Asked in 2001 what drew him, he told the Reno News & Review it was the "wide-open spaces and great big skies," adding that there was no traffic and no trees. He also admired something in the people: "People take you for what you're worth here."

San Francisco Streets and the First Mural: 1984

In 1984 Holland painted his first mural, on a gas station in Stinson Beach, California, according to both Artspace and the Reno News & Review. The same period found him selling paintings on the streets of San Francisco. KUNR reports that a turning point came when he painted in front of the ACT Theater and sold a canvas to a performer. It is an early instance of a pattern that would follow him for decades: painting in public, in full view, and selling from the easel. He later told the Reno News & Review that roughly one in five public painting sessions led to a sale.

The Battle Mountain Bugle: 1985

The 2001 Reno News & Review profile dates his arrival in Nevada as a resident to 1985, when he worked briefly as a reporter for the Battle Mountain Bugle, the weekly paper of Lander County. This Is Reno's 2014 account confirms the Bugle job and says that afterward he devoted himself to painting Nevada subjects. The two dates in the record, 1979 for his first sight of the state and 1985 for living and working in it, are consistent rather than contradictory, and we present them that way.

The newspaper years matter to the art. Holland has drawn political cartoons and illustrations for most of his adult life. His cartoons have appeared in the Nevada Appeal in Carson City and in the Reno News & Review, where he was a longtime contributor. His first book, Outback Cartoonist, was published with the support of a Nevada Arts Council grant, according to This Is Reno. We were unable to locate a publisher's listing or publication date for the book and do not give one.

Alaska and the Fairbanks Murals: 1990s

Through the 1990s Holland lived in Alaska and painted numerous murals around Fairbanks, according to Artspace and the Reno News & Review. The 2001 profile adds that he returned to Nevada from Alaska in 1999. No complete list of the Fairbanks murals has been published that we could find, and we have not attempted to identify individual walls.

Reno and the Riverside Artist Lofts: 2000 Onward

Since 2000 Holland has lived and worked in the Riverside Artist Lofts, the artist housing created inside the former Riverside Hotel on the Truckee River in downtown Reno and operated by Artspace. His Artspace profile describes him as a lifetime artist who has painted almost every day for twenty years, and it notes that from 2000 he began holding yearly art shows in Reno. In KUNR's 2019 interview he credited the stability of the lofts as one of the lucky breaks of his career. Asked about the hardships of the working artist's life, his answer was short: "Yeah, but I gotta paint!"

Reno itself became a subject. Our Town Reno's 2016 profile describes him painting the signs and architectural details of vintage downtown motels as redevelopment threatened them, among them the Castaway Inn and the El Cortez Hotel. He was a founder and repeated "Dada Mayor" of Nada Dada, the long running motel based art event in Reno. He has also been active in civic life; Our Town Reno and the Nevada Press Association both record that he ran for mayor of Reno, in 2006 and, per Our Town Reno, again in 2014.

While landscape is the core of his work, he has also produced occasional history paintings. Artspace singles out a large canvas, Cesar Chavez Long March.

Painting a Building in Every Town

By 2006 Holland had set himself a project that defines much of his reputation outside Reno. The Nevada Appeal reported that May that he aimed to paint at least one historic building in every town in Nevada, travelling the state about eight weekends a year, with Tuscarora and Midas next on his list. His reasoning was direct: "I like the old buildings because they have a story." He was equally clear about what he would not paint: "once a building comes down I'm not interested anymore." Gentrified buildings, he added, lost his interest too.

The Appeal listed Carson City and Comstock subjects already completed, including Jack's Bar, the Nevada Press Association building, Java Joe's, the Lucky Spur, the Hardwicke House in Silver City, the Miners Union building in Virginia City, Piper's Opera House and the Silver Dollar Hotel. A June 2006 Reno show of his Carson City paintings was priced from $250 to $1,000.

The project produced concentrated series in the old mining towns along US 50. By his own account to This Is Reno in 2014, he had painted twenty five buildings each in Austin and in Ely before turning to Eureka.

Eureka, 2014

Holland spent several months of 2014 painting Eureka en plein air, working dawn to dusk until, as the Eureka Sentinel put it, he had become a recognizable figure around town. The result was a one man show at the Court House Gallery on Main Street, opening Saturday, October 11, 2014, with a reception from 3 to 7 p.m. Twenty five Eureka canvases were hung and six sold at the opening, according to the Sentinel. Subjects included the Eureka Opera House, the Jackson House, the County Court House, the General Store, the Doll House and the Colonnade Hotel, along with landscapes and residences. One buyer drove from Elko after reading the announcement; a Boy Scout bought the Jackson House.

Holland told the Sentinel, "As a painter I fell in love with this place," and spoke of the gracious welcome he received as a stranger in town. The paintings remained on view through the holidays.

Nevada Historical Society, 2015, and the Rinckel Mansion, 2017

In January 2015 Holland showed at the Nevada Historical Society in Reno, his third exhibition there, according to Artspace and the Reno News & Review. In February 2017 the Nevada Press Association hung Iconic Nevada: Plein Air Paintings from Around the State at the Rinckel Mansion in Carson City, the association's headquarters. The show opened February 4 during the Carson City wine walk, with a second reception on February 8 to welcome state legislators, and included historic buildings, desert landscapes and a group of miniatures made for the exhibition.

Recent Years

In 2018 his painting Winnemucca Valley was displayed at the Metro Gallery in Reno City Hall, as recorded on our artist page. In March 2023 Savage Mystic Gallery at 538 South Virginia Street in Reno honored him with an exhibition and reception; the Reno News & Review's notice described him as represented by several galleries in Reno and California.

Painting Nevada en Plein Air

Plein air painting means finishing, or nearly finishing, a picture outdoors in front of the motif. In Nevada that means wind, light that flattens by midmorning, and distances so large that a ridge twenty miles off still fills the frame.

Holland's method, as described in the press and visible in his canvases, answers those constraints with speed and paint. He works in oil, often thickly, laying color wet into wet rather than waiting for layers to dry. Strokes are left as made; edges are found by the meeting of two loaded colors rather than drawn and filled. The aim is the effect of light on a specific place at a specific hour, not a detailed inventory of it. Artspace notes that he also works in the studio, producing larger pieces, so not every Holland canvas is a field painting.

The public side of his practice is part of the method. He paints on sidewalks and main streets, talks to the people who stop, and sells from the easel. In Eureka, the result was a town that knew him by sight before the show opened.

He has also passed the method on. He taught at Rainshadow Community Charter High School in Reno, confirmed by This Is Reno and the Nevada Appeal, and Our Town Reno described him in 2016 as a high school art teacher. His biographical material and our own records also list teaching at Sierra Arts in Reno and workshops at St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City; we were not able to confirm those programs' dates from an independent published source.

Reading the Signature

Holland is a working painter who has made a very large number of pictures, so a firm signature catalogue does not exist in print. What follows is based on the signed and dated example we have handled directly, together with general guidance for his field work. We would welcome documented examples from collectors.

• Form. On our 2013 canvas the painting is signed with his name and dated with a two digit year, the date reading 13. A two digit year should be read as the year of painting.
• Placement. Lower left on our example.
• Medium. Painted in oil with the brush, in a pale blue drawn from the picture's own palette rather than black. Expect the signature color to vary from picture to picture with the palette in use that day.
• Reverse. The backing of our example is inscribed in ink, Artist Erik Holland. Verso inscriptions, gallery labels and framer's labels are useful supporting evidence and should be photographed before any reframing.
• Framing as a dating aid. Our example carries a hand completed Aaron Brothers custom framing label. Aaron Brothers closed nearly all of its stores in 2018, which places that framing between the painting date and 2018.

Because Holland is living and active, the most reliable authentication route is provenance: purchase records from the artist, his galleries or his shows (the Eureka Court House Gallery, Nevada Historical Society and Rinckel Mansion exhibitions among them), together with the subject, which in his building portraits can usually be matched to a real, identifiable structure.

Style and Subjects

Holland's work falls into a few recognizable groups.

1. Great Basin landscape. Ridges, valleys, playas and mountain ranges across central and eastern Nevada, frequently with sagebrush or rabbitbrush in the foreground and a large, active sky. Titles on record include Fitzgerald Peak, Ruby Mountains, Antelope and Clouds and Winnemucca Valley.
2. Building portraits. Courthouses, opera houses, hotels, bars and storefronts in Austin, Ely, Eureka, Carson City, Virginia City, Silver City and elsewhere, painted from the street and anchored in their real surroundings.
3. Reno's endangered architecture. Motel signs, neon and facades in the downtown corridor, painted as a record before redevelopment.
4. Wild horses and wildlife, painted in the field, as KUNR reported.
5. California subjects, including Central Valley orchards; Artspace lists Almond Blossoms, Central Valley.
6. History paintings, occasional and larger, such as Cesar Chavez Long March.
7. Cartoons and illustration, a separate body of work in ink for newspapers and for Outback Cartoonist.

Across the paintings the constants are heavy, visible brushwork, a high key palette that pushes Nevada's violets, ochres and yellows rather than muting them, and a preference for a place's character over its picturesque qualities.

Where to See His Work

Holland's work has been shown at the Nevada Historical Society in Reno, the Court House Gallery in Eureka, the Rinckel Mansion in Carson City, the Metro Gallery at Reno City Hall and Savage Mystic Gallery in Reno, and he has held regular shows in Reno since 2000. Press accounts describe gallery representation in Reno and California. Because gallery arrangements change, we recommend checking with the artist directly for current shows and commissions; he maintains an online portfolio at Erik Holland Fine Art.

Our Painting

Erik Holland Nevada High Desert Plein Air Oil on Canvas, Signed, 2013 is a canvas of approximately 14 x 18 inches. A lavender ridge sweeps down from the left under a pale blue green sky streaked with cream and a single band of coral. At upper right a dark rimrock crag catches a thin line of orange along its lit edge, and the long olive and ochre slope below it is in full yellow bloom with rabbitbrush, the late summer and early fall color of the high desert.

It is a characteristic field painting: heavy impasto, colors worked wet into wet, ridges of pigment standing proud of the canvas, nothing smoothed afterward. It is signed and dated in pale blue at the lower left, the date reading 13, and the backing is inscribed in ink Artist Erik Holland. The custom frame, a stepped molding in mottled silver and bronze with a wide cream linen liner, carries an Aaron Brothers label completed by hand. The location is not named on the canvas or backing, and we do not assign one. One of a Kind, 1 Available.

Timeline

Sources

• Reno News & Review, "15 Minutes: Erik Holland," January 25, 2001
• Nevada Appeal, "Reno plein air artist captures Nevada history," May 21, 2006
• This Is Reno, "Reno painter Erik Holland's show opens at Eureka Court House Gallery," September 2014
• Eureka Sentinel, "Reno Painter Holds Art Show at Eureka Court House," October 23, 2014
• Our Town Reno, "Erik Holland, The Nada Dada Mayor of Endangered Motels," June 19, 2016
• Nevada Press Association, "Iconic Nevada coming to Rinckel Mansion," 2017
• KUNR Youth Media, "The Life of a 'Starving Artist' in Nevada," August 1, 2019
• Reno News & Review, Savage Mystic Gallery exhibition notice, March 21, 2023
• Artspace Projects, artist profile: Erik Holland
• Erik Holland Fine Art, the artist's website

If you own a painting by Erik Holland, can document a show or signature variant not recorded here, or would like to see our 2013 canvas in person, contact us to Inquire About This Piece or Request a Private Viewing at The Eclection in Reno.