“In my art I want answers; failing that, very good questions. At last I want revelation. Otherwise, I have no need for art.”

Laurence Holden is an artist and poet working in mixed media, oils, watercolor, intaglio and monoprint printmaking, ceramics, sculpture and drawing. His work has been featured in over 20 solo exhibits, is represented in over 200 public, private and corporate collections, and he has been commissioned to create major works for public spaces. He is most widely known for his series of mixed media paintings The Garden of the Golden Sections 1984-2001. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, including Whole Terrain, Appalachian Heritage, Written River, Chrysalis Reader, and collected in several anthologies including The Reach Of Song: the Poetry Anthology of the Georgia Poetry Society.

His work has long explored an elegiac response to the natural world. Transformations of form and content move throughout his work in a way the painter Pat Adams has described his work as creating “the beauty of a doubleness of meaning with a vivid literalness to it.”

Laurence lives in the Northeast Georgia mountains of the US along the northern edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest. He lives here because these mountains sustain him and his art – light, dark, the round of seasons, the time of deep past, deep present, and deep future, these all speak to him, mixing here in alchemal mists that both reveal and hide and transform these steep slopes, shaded coves, bright rivers and deep forests – just as they do his life and work.

I am an artist. It’s what I do – paint pictures & write poems. But it is also who I am – how I view the world and access its meaning. This gift of art is something that has little meaning outside of the sharing of it, so I have also often taught art as a natural dimension of making and being an artist.

Over the last 50 years I have shared the knowing that is art in many places, in hundreds of workshops and classes – along the Talkeetna River in Alaska, on the barrier islands off the coast of Georgia, in sandlot “classrooms” of poverty stricken inner city neighborhoods and in university lecture halls, in kindergarten enrichment programs, elementary schools, high schools and community art centers, in undergraduate and graduate university programs, and once even in a maximum security prison (fortunately as an invited guest!) . I have learned surely as much as I have taught – mostly that true art can blossom anywhere when the true self is revealed and willing spirits gather together to share. It’s as simple as that.