Erik Holland is a plein air landscape painter who has lived and worked in downtown Reno since 2000, in a studio at the Riverside Artist Lofts inside the old Riverside Hotel on the Truckee. Born in Detroit and raised in Chicago, he trained at the Art Students League of New York, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, and he has spent the better part of forty years painting Nevada standing up, outdoors, in front of the thing he is painting.

I paint Nevada and beyond because I love the wide open spaces of the West. When the sky is at its finest, or the warm afternoon sun gilds the sagebrush hills with light, I am very happy.

En Plein Air

His subject is the Great Basin: sagebrush hills under a big sky, lavender ridges, rimrock in late light. The paint goes on thick and fast, worked wet into wet, and it is left alone once it is right. Holland has painted almost every day for more than twenty years, most of it outdoors, and builds larger and more complex pictures in the studio, including a history painting of César Chávez's long march.

The Nevada Towns

Alongside the open country, he has made a long study of rural Nevada's architecture, painting twenty-five building portraits each in Austin and Ely before moving on to Eureka, where his October 2014 show at the Court House Gallery hung twenty-five canvases and sold six on the first day. He has shown three times at the Nevada Historical Society and at the Rinckel Mansion in Carson City, and has been carried by galleries across Nevada, California and Oregon. His first book, Outback Cartoonist, was published with support from the Nevada Arts Council.

A Painter's Road

1979 First crosses Nevada on U.S. Route 50, westbound from Chicago.
1984 First mural, on a gas station in Stinson Beach, California.
1985 Reporter for the Battle Mountain Bugle.
1990s Murals across Fairbanks, Alaska; political cartoons from 1996.
2000 Studio at the Riverside Artist Lofts, Reno; teaching at Rainshadow Community Charter High School, Sierra Arts and St. Mary's Art Center, Virginia City.
2014 One-man show at the Court House Gallery, Eureka.
2015–2017 Nevada Historical Society; Rinckel Mansion, Carson City.

Inquire About Available Works

Paintings by Erik Holland come to the Eclection one at a time, each signed and one of a kind. View available works or Request a Private Viewing at the Morris building on East Fourth Street.