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The "3 Americas" Show --- the beginning. . . . . things happen. She is Susan Holland, and she is pulling a show together, linking countries of North, Central and South America. . . with a lot of help from her friends. Susan is a rural mail deliverer, living on the side of a cedar covered mountain in Washington State. What makes Susan Holland tick? Susan Holland wrote: "My chosen medium is as much people as it is paint, and my greatest satisfaction is to see how the human spirit is uplifted and fed by the mixture of art and human connection. People and Art! Art and People! From the very beginning I was making marks. When I was five I begged and wheedled little dabs of oil paint from my mother's supply which I put on an old shingle as a palette, and off I went to render the neighbor's flower garden. In fourth grade I had my first "one person show" as a supportive teacher hung about fifty pastels all around the wood molding of my classroom. At 13 (1951) I was painting at the life classes at the Wallingford Community Arts Center in Pennsylvania, along with some surprised adult artists who wondered, I am sure, at what kind of parents would allow their little girl to be painting nudes! (My canny parents knew what they were doing.) At George School I included an Art Major in my curriculum, and when it came to college I passed up a scholarship to Skidmore to take another scholarship to Temple University's Tyler School of Fine Arts. I developed curriculum and taught art for the Valley Forge Christian Academy for five years when my children were young. Finding myself a single mother of teens in 1980, I turned to the computer field to try to earn a living wage. I graduated with a BS in Computer Science and Systems Analysis, and went out into the high-stress middle-of-the-night craziness of computer programming. I downgraded, for sanity's sake, to an office manager's job in a wholesale art firm. Later I picked up brushes again, and got some new impetus from a watercolor class I took with my mother to aid in dealing with the grief of my father's death. An oil done of my mother during that time won a "First" at the prestigious Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Fair! (this painting is lost--the buyer is no longer to be found, alas! Never do this to yourself, folks!) My northwest art career began again in earnest soon after this, moving forward with painting and drawing on commission of animate subjects: humans and animals. Along with my love of art comes a profound curiosity about people, and a love of "one-on-one" interactions with them. Possibly the most interesting thing about people to me is the story each has, and how much each of us is a part of the others' stories! Beneath each unique story is a heartbeat held in common with other humans, and I am convinced that to keep from killing each other, humans must know and care for one another--in the commonality of this heartbeat. The language of visual art is a perennial vehicle for human understanding, transcending cultural and language barriers. Now computers have rushed us into each others' worlds with a powerful visual tool! Who knows what wonders our art will teach us about each other?
In April 1998 six of us earnest artists who "met" on an on-line art message
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