Life

Born in Topeka into a family of abolitionist Presbyterian ministers from Vermont and New Hampshire, Charles Edward “Bud” Holman II grew up during the Depression living simply — attending a one-room schoolhouse, saddling his horse each morning, riding the open plains.

“I packed myself a sandwich in the mornings, saddled my horse, and spent the days riding across open land.” Bud Holman

He collected arrowheads left by the Shawnee Indians who had lived and hunted on those same plains, and 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.

His first glimpse of the Southwestern desert came in the early 1940s aboard the Union Pacific Railroad, gazing out the window on two-day train rides from Kansas to California. Those vast, mountainous landscapes sparked something deep, germinating in his mind’s eye for decades before they emerged on canvas.

In his early teenage years, Bud spent vacations visiting cousins in Pasadena. The renowned landscape painter Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, a neighbor and friend, gave him his first formal lessons in landscape painting.

As a student at Stanford, Bud worked at the Stanford Museum, piecing together thousands of pottery shards from the Cesnola collection from Cyprus, dating back to 2500 BC. He encountered Sarah Stein — sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein — whose house was wall-to-wall Matisses, Cézannes, and Picassos.

“Once when I opened a closet to hang up my coat, I found myself face-to-face with three Picasso portraits of the Stein family hanging on the inside of the door!” Bud Holman

Stein spent many afternoons painting with him in her garden, side by side. He still has a painting they made together of a bay tree, on the back of an old masonite test board used for exams at Stanford.

During the summers of his university years, Bud landed a job as an artist with Sunset magazine, being paid to travel to remote areas of Mexico to sketch scenes of old towns and cathedrals.

From 1951 Bud traveled extensively through Greece, Crete, and Turkey. He then traveled to Europe for several months returning to Kansas in 1993

Below are some of Bud's work during this period. Mission was part of a series he did as an assignment for Sunset Magazine while traveling in Mexico over the summer while at Stanford. The Flood Mansion Gatehouse was a painting experimenting with casein paint. The Flood Mansion was close to Stanford and Bud made this painting as part of a larger painting of the mansion. On the far right is a page from Bud's sketchbook which he filled on travels to Greece on a merchant ship.

After college, in 1953, Bud accepted a position as director of the Kansas State Historical Museum. The following year he headed for New York City, finding a studio with a huge skylight in the West Village and a job at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1957 and ’58, his 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.

“I threw a party for Twombly on his last night in New York, before he moved to Rome.” Bud Holman

In 1959, Bud was hired by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to assemble a $12 million art collection for the 60-story Chase Manhattan Bank on Wall Street, under the direction of David Rockefeller — America’s first major corporate art collection.

In the 1960s he became friends with Warhol and Willem de Kooning, meeting for drinks at the Cedar Bar and Max’s Kansas City. He traveled extensively — Turkey, Egypt, Morocco — producing the Tuareg landscape series and the Voyage to Crete paintings. The Sag Harbor and Sagaponack summers produced the Blue Mist series.

Below are some of Bud's work during this period. On the left is a series of oil paintings on rag paper which draw their inspiration from a trip to Morocco where Bud visited the Tuareg people. Since the trip to Morocco he always used the deep blue color of the Tuaregs in various paintings. The middle paiinting is from an annual trip to Long Island where he drew inspiration from the sea and seashore. On the right is one of only a few sculptures to survive the moves from studio to studio.

In 1974, drawn to the freedom and open spaces of the Southwest, Bud moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, purchasing a 225-year-old adobe hacienda on Canyon Road that he restored. He spent much time visiting all the pueblos along the Rio Grande and Acoma to observe Native American dances and rituals.

“The three countries that have had the most impact on me in terms of color are Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco. I was heavily influenced by the swirl of action, the vibrant sense of color, the patterns of tiles, and the exotic dress of the natives.” Bud Holman

In the late 1970s, he exhibited at the influential Jean Seth’s gallery on Canyon Road. Three of his paintings were acquired by the New Mexico Museum of Art and remain part of their permanent collection.

There is a tactile quality to Bud’s painting that sets the mood. He applies paint with aggression, creating multiple layers. Because the paint is applied thickly, he must allow it to dry for several days before applying the next layer, so he works on several paintings at a time — what he refers to as a “pentimento” style, with underlying traces of past paintings barely visible through new layers.

Below are some of Bud's work during this period. Bud painted a number of landscapes featuring adobe homes or pueblos, a departure from the mostly abstract landscapes during this period. In the center is a representation of a kachina used in Hopi religious ceremonies. He experimented with colors in a circle sometimes heavy impasto and other times lighter based on wether he was using canvas, panel, or even styrofoam as a base.

Moving to Tucson, Bud continued his intensive engagement with the Sonoran landscape. The Catalina Mountains and the desert light of southern Arizona deepened the palette that had begun to emerge in Santa Fe — more intense oranges and reds, the particular greens of high-desert vegetation.

“Here and there 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.” Bud Holman

In Santa Fe he had created a series of “painted constructions,” embalming bits of cinder rock, rope, wood, toothpicks, nails, spoons, and gravel with paint. His pentimento approach — layering paint so that older paintings breathe through newer ones — became fully mature during these Tucson years.

The Tucson Museum of Art acquired four paintings while Bud was in Tucson.

In Tucson bud embraced the desert mountians. He experimented with color using blocks or dots. Rincon Mountains shows this technique creating a landscape with blocks of color. His landscapes began to become much more abstract with sweeping compositions drawing the eye into the painting. High Sonoran Landscape introduced color juxtaposition. In Arizona Landscape #2, Bud uses smaller dots of color to create the scene.

In Nogales, surrounded by Zapotec rugs, pre-Columbian objects, and decades of his own canvases, Bud produced his most intensely colored and physically dense work. The Sonoran desert and the colored hills of the US–Mexico borderlands gave him a subject equal to his ambition.

“Painting is my way of life. "The 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne declared, 'I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.' That notion appeals to me. I, too, would like to be found at the end of my life in my unfinished garden, in the midst of one last painting . . .” Bud Holman

In March 2024, the Museo de Arte de Nogales mounted a retrospective of 58 paintings, curated by Samuel Saunders. He had also exhibited at the Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas in a single-artist retrospective from July 2017 to February 2018.

He painted until the end, completing works in his nineties that show no diminishment of vision or energy. Charles Edward “Bud” Holman II passed in Nogales, Arizona in 2023, aged 96.

Below are some of Bud's later paintings. He enjoyed the colors of the homes across the border in the hills of Nogales, Sonora. In the painting on the left are blocks of color on the field of green. In the middle ws a continuation of using dots of paint to form a composition. Bud experimented with several paintings with bright colors like the one on the right.