Holly Altman, Fiber Artist and Art Quilter: February 2013

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Mark Lipinski Radio Show

I’ll be a guest on Mark Lipinski’s “Creative Mojo” live internet radio show this Wednesday, February 13 (3-5 pm EST, 2-4 pm CST, 1-3 pm MST, or 12-2 pm PST). If you can listen live at that time, go here:http://toginet.com/ Mark’s show notes with all the guest info are here:http://toginet.com/shows/creativemojo And if you can’t listen live, go to iTunes for a recording: iTunes Store>Search for Creative Mojo>See All>Look for the 2/13/2013 show and click on it.

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About Holly

A fiber artist living in Santa Fe, Holly has been creating art for as long as she can remember. She began taking art lessons as a child, showing an aptitude for using nature as her muse. She studied marine biology at the University of Miami, where she did scientific illustration for professors and graduate researchers. Through her teen and college years, her pictures of the natural world found a steady market.

Vera, the famed woman's designer, hired Holly as a staff designer. Holly eventually went into business for herself, creating original textile designs for everything from dresses to wallpaper. This first of several artistic careers continued for nearly 20 years.

In the early 1990s, Holly turned from textiles to the creation and fabrication of jewelry. A self-professed "tool freak," Holly found she had a real talent for working metal. Again, her designs were often inspired by nature. Apart from selling privately, her work was offered by galleries in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state, where she had a studio, the Rochester Art Museum, and Oaxaca, Mexico, a cultural and artistic mecca reminiscent of Santa Fe.

After moving to Santa Fe in 2005, she experienced a profound artistic change of heart. Everyone, she recalls, seemed to be involved in making silver jewelry, a cultural legacy that overwhelmed her at the time, but helped impel her to explore a totally new path--fiber art.

Holly's return to the world of cloth and thread fused all of her experience in a rich and fresh tableaux. Her ability to draw, her three-dimensional skill in sculpting materials (as she did in jewelry-making) and her prowess in combining the two in larger-scale, fiber-based projects bore singular creative fruit.

Her first major work, a multi-hued portrait of her pet chameleon, Darwin, took first place in its category at the 2008 Fiber Arts Fiesta in Albuquerque. Since then, her work has won numerous awards and she has been asked to give workshops on the techniques that give her fiber art its individual character and impact.