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08/25/2010: "Betty Holliday"

Like many informally trained artists, I've pieced together a pastiche of arts education, culled from extensive readings combined with the educational offerings of the surrounding geographic area. From 1993 through 1998, I studied painting and drawing with Sands Point's Betty Holliday. Holliday, an eccentric Long Island beauty, graduated with her masters in Art History from Harvard and was proud to have worked with American modernist painter, Vaclav Vytlacil, the renowned instructor who taught at the Art Students League in New York City. A successful painter and photographer, Holliday was also an excellent and popular teacher, instructing scores of Long Islanders in the abstraction of the figure and its placement in space.

Betty Holliday, who counted the better-known Louise Nevelson. among her colleagues, reached modest success when an early ink drawing was shown in a 1956 juried exhibition, called "Recent Drawings USA", at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Besides Holliday, the well received show included Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers and Larry Rivers. Holliday also gained renown for taking photographs and writing art reviews for Art News magazine. After her marriage to a Long Island surgeon, Betty settled into an eccentric, art focused, life in a rambling ranch house near the water in Sands Point. The marriage didn't last, and long time love affairs sustained her personal life, but the artwork continued until huge canvas portraits and immense figurative drawings took over every room in the house.


Holliday was the master of expressive line, using boldly swooping gesture to capture the dejection of a figure or the sexuality of a flower. In 1981, when Holliday was at the peak of her artistic endeavor, Helen Harrison, writing in the New York Times, aptly described Holliday as, "….an artist for whom drawing is the esthetic cornerstone, the basis for everything she creates and expresses. Whether using oils, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal or ink, she is first and foremost a draftsman….As Monet used color, so Miss Holliday uses line to weave a tapestry of pictorial richness that shifts back and forth between representation and abstraction." (NY Times, Dec. 6, 1981).

For many years, Holliday taught drawing and painting at the Roslyn Museum of Fine Arts and in her home studio. I took advantage of both and still hear her voice in my head, commenting on space, line and composition. "Never say, I like it," " "that’s meaningless," she said. Instead, "…ask yourself, what have I said, how have I said it? What is the scale? What are the materials?" "A work of art," Holliday said, "is a failure unless it appears to have always existed on the page or canvas." The result, she emphasized must look as thought it "happened - art that looked as though it had been constructed is a failure."

Holliday taught from the 1960’s through the 1990’s leaving a legacy of artistic integrity on Long Island. She is still alive but suffers from dementia and resides at a nursing home in Port Washington.