Inside: Doug Holst Interview (Pt.1)

Untitled from Pentomino Solutions Series 57 by Douglas Holst

In a new feature on the Shifter Blog, we interview Milwaukee artist Douglas Holst about inspiration, shapes and art. Doug is showing his recent work this week at the AAF Art Fair in NY.

MS: If you were a shape which would you be?

DH: Nothing too spikey, like a triangle. Definitely
something symetrical though. Nothing too random, or
unique. I'm drawn towards ideals. How about a
semi-circle? It is the best of both worlds -- a
straight edge and a curved one. Even though it
implies incompleteness I like semicircles. Or else a
nice oval.

MS: Did you always want to be an artist?

DH: As a kid I was constantly making stuff, coloring and reading,
and I said that I either wanted to be an artist or a writer. I sent an
Encyclopedia Brown short story I had
written to author Donald J. Sobol but I never heard
back from him. I won a 10 speed bike in the Kellogg's
Stick Up For Breakfast contest and a pocket watch in a
Jolly Green Giant coloring contest. The bike was
stolen just a few weeks after I got it. I went to a
very small private school for Jr. high and high scool
where sports was EVERYTHING, so i got very involved
with soccer and basketball but I was never very good
at sports. My junior year in high school they finally
offered an art class, and during the first week of
school that year I KNEW that I had found what I wanted
to do, and I have never even briefly considered doing
anything else. It gives me a lot of satisfaction.

MS: What inspires you?

DH: From being a human being with 2 eyes, I guess.
It's a self-perpetuating thing for me. One painting
leads to another. That's the kind of question I
thought about a lot as an art student, but I've been
doing this long enough now that the work has taken on
a life of it's own. The work doesn't follow me
around, I follow it and I've quit asking questions.
I'm usually too busy painting to be bothered.

MS: Which artists have inspired your work?

DH: I could give you a long list with literally
hundreds of names. I love art history, especially the
last 100 years or so. I worked for 11 years as a
security guard at the Milwaukee Art Museum, both
because i needed a day job but also because I wanted
to spend time with the art. I'm not ashamed to admit
to having been influenced by the work of others.
Cezanne said that we are all just links in a chain.
My friend Dave says that if you ask someone who is in
a band what his or her music sounds like and they say
something like "we don't sound like anything you've
ever heard before", you KNOW that they suck, that they
have a tiny record collection and that they haven't
listened to much music. Everyone sounds like someone
else. Sure, we all hopefully have something unique to
contribute, and you always want to be careful not to
be derivative, but it is pretty arrogant to think that
you don't need to be informed about the history of art
if you are going to be a serious artist. All of that
having been said, some artists that have interested me
very much in the last few years are swiss artists Max
Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Karl Gerstner. All are
abstract painters with a strong emphasis on color and
simple visual relationships. Bill studied at the
Bauhaus and was not only a great sculptor and painter
but an influential designer. I think he had a lot to
do with the Swatch, actually. Gerstner founded a very
important design firm, GGK, before he eventually
devoted himself to painting full-time. Anyone
interested in good design should definitely be
familiar with them. Gerstner has written some
exceelent books which I would highly reccommend to any
artist or designer. Gerstner says

"The form is the body of the color.
The color is the soul of the form."

I love that. It's such a fundamental, beautiful
lesson that I am only now beginning to learn. It's
the kind of stuff that would bore non-artists to tears
though. A few years ago my friend Dave (again),
bought Josef Albers' "The Interaction of Color" and he
decided to give it to me. He said "this whole book is
about putting colors next to other colors. I can't
read THIS!"

MS: Tell us about Milwaukee. Why not NY, LA, Chicago?

DH: I didn't know I was allowed to leave! Milwaukee
is a very difficult place to be an artist because so
few people really care about art, not to mention
actually buying art. I was interested in moving to
New York last year but I am poor. Laziness and
inertia have kept me here, I guess. Bodies at rest
tend to stay at rest. I think that I could do better
for myself somewhere else though.

MS: What's your favorite shape?

DH: It's so interesting that you have a web site
devoted to shapes! I think shapes are like numbers --
some are just more elegant and beautiful than others.
Like I said, I dislike shapes that are random or make
little or no sense. These last few years I have been
obsessed with shapes called pentominoes, which are
formed by combining five squares. There are 18
different pentominoes. Oh, there are those people who
will try to tell you that there are only 12 different
pentominoes, but don't you believe them! To my way of
thinking there are 18 because 6 of them are
asymmetrical, and when you flip over an "l" shape, for
example, that's an entirely different shape! I cut
pieces of paper into the 18 different pentomino shapes
and I began to try to piece them together, like a
jigsaw puzzle, into complete rectangles of 9 x 10.
Try it some time. It ain't so easy. I felt like I
had tapped into something, and I have since done
dozens of paintings based on this basic formula.
I'm not sure I have (a favorite shape). I prefer
shapes that make sense. Randomness and chance make me
uneasy. I prefer order and structure.

Next week we'll wrap up our interview with Doug talking process, computers and meaning. Have a great weekend.