Only This Moment — Holland Hardie

Only This Moment

October 7 - November 26, 2022

Remarque Print Workshop

Suddenly it all came to a halt - and it felt like the weird, unexpected silence when a loud A/C unit shuts off and you realize you were overwhelmed by the persistent roaring, without even quite noticing it. My life had been overflowing with worry and chaos for so long that I didn’t know how to comprehend its absence. Instead, I sat and stared, reeling in some strange mix of numbness, joy, and sadness. I didn’t have curtains in my new house yet, so I woke with the sun every morning and stared out my window, listening to the birds until I had to get up. My evenings were much the same – I sat and watched the dramatic monsoon rains outside my living room window.

The longer I looked at these new views of home, the more the scenes outside crystallized into abstracted fields of color and line. I found myself enamored by the strong white outlines of my neighbors’ windows and the varied green mounds of desert plants below them. I began drawing what I saw, and those sketches became this print series. Each one was inspired by some little, beautiful thing that struck me about my new home: moonlight on my mulberry tree, the contrast of tan adobe on stormy skies, the geometry and color of a brick pathway.

Creating this series helped me forge a sense of place in my new house, and filled the roaring silence I felt when I first moved in. It taught me to pay attention to the world’s small beauties again, something I’d completely forgotten to do in the oppressive noise of my life before.

By now, many of the prints are no longer based on real scenes at all, but are built out of the vocabulary of repeating symbols I created over the course of the series. However, each one still evokes the same feeling behind the very first prints – a sense of place, the joy of a new start, the rawness of enormous change, and the sorrow of great loss.

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