Lions Tigers and Bears

When you "populate" a blog, for the purpose of promotion, you start at the end and work backwards. In other words. First you write your first entry. Then your next, and next. Eventually, weeks, months or years later, there is a bunch of content. But the reader starts with the most recent. By the time this blog will really be read (if ever) these first entries may seem to tell the story in reverse.

Gino Hollander is very recognizable. And a person that approaches Gino's material, with an eye for appreciation, can't help but see categories. There are Gino's iconic faces. To this reviewer, those are the images that first hooked me and bring me back, every time, with a certain emotion. That emotion is a kind of pain, I guess. A beautiful pain. I doubt if Gino would give much credence to what I'm saying, and this is, after all, just my opinion. But it is a kind of pain that the body craves.

I was thinking of this the other day. If we were just some kind of Spirit form, without our bodies, but we had at one time occupied our bodies, my theory is that we would especially miss body sensations. Hunger, the wind against our skin, the shock of bright sunlight, the sensation from having a cut, or a bruise. Feeling tired. Exhaustion. Sexual sensations. Arousal.

This is the kind of pain I mean while I look at Gino's iconic faces. He is Jewish by birth, A cosmologist (although I've never heard him refer to himself as such) by ideology. But there are features in his females that exhibit Jewish genetics. How could they not? He may argue that those images aren't family, perhaps they're not. But a writer will tell you, or I should say a successful writer, will tell you, that when he or she first realized the secret to writing well, was writing what he or she knows about, my guess is that it goes for painters too.

In those faces, there isn't so much the emotion of the model, as the emotion of the artist, in my opinion. I don't know if Gino was sad or feeling any negative emotion, but to me, there is certainly pain. My guess is that it is a celebration. A vindication. Not of overcoming some sad state of the world, but of capturing it and releasing it.Expelling it, sort of.

But whatever it is, it attracts me.

Then the other things by category that he paints are groups, nudes, mountains, boats, abstracts and what he refers to as "The Universe Series." The Universe series is very important, in my opinion, because of how it has impacted the artist.

He'll tell the story that about 6 years ago, he officially died. Like for real. Enough time elapsed that he would have had to have been dead. I can't give you precise details. But leave it at that. Gino died.

Afterwards, it wasn't like he would tell the story of walking down the corridor filled with light, or hearing some voice, or coming back by choice, or whatever. It was just after that death experience, he had the urge to paint the universe series. In those canvases, which to me, some are very strong and others less so, a viewer will see the universe, as if a NASA photograph. These have come in what Gino would call his later "third life," i.e. in old age.

This mix of images are from across the board.