2023 Bud Holman 'Untitled' Oil on Canvas. This was part of a color theory series the artist was working on close to the time of his passing during 2023. Inspired by the south western landscape of Holman's  border-town home of Nogales. This lush hillside town is scattered with uplifting bright colored Mexican homes, whilst only a short distance to the dry vast surrounds of the Sonoran Desert. This is said to be one of the artists final pieces that he worked on before his passing in May 2023. This original artwork was purchased from the artists estate in July 2023. Artwork comes with letter of authenticity. An array of the artist's paintings are currently listed on First Dibs for $12,000 - $24,000.
 
Note - FREE white glove shipping across the United States.
 
Size: 24”W x 36”H.
 
Condition: Excellent condition. 
 
About the Artist - Bud Holman
Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1926, Bud Holman lived simply, attending a one-room schoolhouse. He packed himself a sandwich in the mornings, saddled his horse, and spent his days riding across open land. He found arrowheads left by Shawnee Indians who had lived and hunted on those same plains. He also collected butterflies and night-flying moths. His resourcefulness, imagination, and closeness to the earth during these formative years became his touchstones as an artist. Bud Holman's first glimpse of the Southwestern desert was in the early 1940s, when he took train rides from Kansas to California, where he spent summers as a boy. Those vast, mountainous landscapes sparked something deep down, germinating in his mind's eye for decades before they emerged on canvas.

As a student at Stanford University during the 1940s, Bud Holman worked at the Stanford Museum. At this time, Bud Holman met Sarah Stein, who lived in Palo Alto. Stein was an influential art collector who befriended, supported, and popularized Henri Matisse. As Bud Holman sat down to tea in Stein's living room, his gaze fell upon Woman in a Hat, Matisse's seminal 1905 portrait of the woman with the green stripe down her nose. He was stunned by Stein's formidable collection of early 20th century avant-garde French masterpieces. Her house was wall-to-wall with Matisses, Cezannes and Picassos. "Once when I opened a closet to hang up my coat", Bud Holman recalls, "I found myself face-to-face with three Picasso portraits of the Stein family hanging on the inside of the door!". Taking an interest in Bud Holman as a budding artist, Stein spent many afternoons with him in her garden, painting side by side.

After college, in 1953, Bud Holman accepted a position as the director of the Kansas State Historical Museum. But the following year, Bud Holman headed for New York City. He found an artist's studio with a huge skylight in the West Village and a job at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1957 and '58, Bud Holman's paintings were featured in group shows at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly, who became a confidante. In 1959, Bud Holman showed his work at the prestigious Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Bud Holman often stopped off at Twombly's studio (where Twombly lived with Rauschenberg and Johns) to discuss art over beer and sandwiches. Twombly spent his last night in New York, before he moved to Rome, at a party thrown by Bud Holman.

In 1959, Bud Holman was hired by the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Over the course of the next several years, he assembled a $12 million art collection for the 60-story Chase Manhattan Bank on Wall Street, under the direction of David Rockefeller. David Rockefeller often expressed his gratitude to Holman for his curatorial role in building the collection during a three-year period. Since Rockefeller knew that Holman was eager to return to painting, for the next three years he would periodically send him friendly letters asking about his art and stressing that he was ready at any time to help promote his career. It would be one of several major opportunities of which Holman would never take advantage. “It’s a great regret that I never replied to those letters. But I was taught that you have to make your way on your own terms. I was determined to make my own success with painting. I had an absolute stubbornness to be untainted.”
 
In the 1960s, as he continued to paint, and Bud Holman became friends with Warhol and Willem de Kooning, meeting up for drinks at the Cedar Bar in the East Village and Max's Kansas City - "Artists' hang-outs that were cheap places for serious drinking, where people got drunk out of their minds!" Bud Holman recalls. Bud Holman traveled extensively during these years. "The three countries that have had the most impact on me in terms of color are Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco," Bud Holman says. "I was heavily influenced by the swirl of action, the vibrant sense of color and color combinations, the patterns of tiles, and the exotic dress of the natives."
 
In 1974, drawn to the freedom and open spaces of the Southwest, Bud Holman moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, purchasing a 225-year-old adobe hacienda on Canyon Road that he restored. However 1983, as Santa Fe became increasingly crowded, so Bud Holman moved to Tucson. At the heart of Bud Holman's work is reverence for the desert in all its atmospheric moments. Bud Holman's fervor for the Catalina, Santa Rita, and Tucson Mountains reverberates through his paintings. Those mountains are always present-some up close, others in the distance. Holman paints in what he refers to as a "pentimento" style, with underlying traces of past paintings barely visible beneath the surface. "Here and there,"" Bud Holman says, "You can see a tidbit of a hidden layer hanging out on one side or the other of my paintings, like gardens overlaid many times for different uses."
 
In 1996, seeking further solitude, Bud Holman left Tucson to build a house and studio in Nogales, Arizona, 60 miles south of Tucson, this is where the artist worked and resided til his passing in May 2023. Even in his 90s, he still painted most days from first light to dusk. "Painting is my way of life," Bud Holman muses. "I, too, would like to be found at the end of my life in my unfinished garden, in the midst of one last painting...".