Holly Jane Valentine
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
A pearl appears in many of Holly Jane Valentine’s paintings, and she uses it as a symbol of the self and the soul. She is an oil painter based in Brooklyn. Her work draws on symbolism, mysticism, and dreams, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Symbolist and Romantic painters.
Her paintings come from her dreams and from meditation, and she says their meaning becomes clear to her only slowly. She admires the old Symbolist painters for keeping their technical skill without being too literal, and she wants to work the same way. Her pictures sometimes show a single figure, and sometimes just an object or a landscape.
Valentine holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She sees painting as a way of dealing with death and the cycles of life, and she believes that seeing itself is a sacred act.
