The Hopkins Hall Gallery at the Ohio State University will open a unique exhibition as part of its summer series, featuring Columbus artist and OSU MFA alumnus Glen Holland, on June 9, on view until June 12. My Blue Hawaii features 12 new egg tempera paintings by Holland that together form a comic book or graphic story on the walls of the gallery—but this “story” is not a traditional, text-based narrative: the words have been partially erased; the narrative is minimal and mysterious. Comic-book-sized/bound prints (an actual comic book) will be available, doubling as an exhibition catalog—and the band bottleflies will perform songs from their new album, My Blue Hawaii, composed as the sound track for the project, on Thursday, June 11 and Friday, June 12 at 2:30 PM.
     Born in Marshall, Texas, Glen Holland painted still lifes in oils for many years, but decades of working 12-15 hours a day with oil paints and the associated solvents took a toll on the artist’s health, and in order to avoid further exposure, he began to experiment in 2012 with new materials and new projects. He began to devote most of his studio hours to what had always been a pastime for him—the drawing of cartoons—and to experiment with egg tempera, and in the process, new painterly ideas emerged: white ink as a correction fluid, the erasure of words and “mistakes” as a prominent feature, reflections on communication in different forms, words as symbols.
     The new work may seem to many long-time admirers of Holland’s still life paintings to be a drastic change, but in fact, the artist notes, he has been drawing cartoons for much longer than he had been making still lifes. “I began drawing cartoons in church when I was a child,” he says. “It was a way to keep occupied during the long hours the preacher's kid had to sit quietly.” Over the years, in his downtime from painting, he’s drawn funny page-style cartoons and graphic narratives but, he says, “the cartoons I like to look at the most are the original drawings for published cartoons and comics exhibited as objects, with all the whiteouts and partially erased pencil lines and smudges splayed out for everyone to see.  My idea now is to create comics that are read/looked at on a wall, exhibited, and seen from a different perspective than either paintings or comic books.” As this new work emerged, ideas about music and its relationship to the paintings began to emerge too, and Holland formed a band with other Columbus artists. My Blue Hawaii is the result. This is its debut exhibition.

Hopkins Hall Gallery/OSU/128 North Oval Mall/Columbus, Ohio
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