Loie Hollowell is a Northern California painter who now lives and works in New York City. Her mother was a Burner who traveled to Burning Man nearly every year. Hollowell tagged along, and in doing so, grew up witnessing parades of colour and light in barren spaces throbbing with electric and sensual vibrations.

By focusing on a formal abstraction of elemental functions of human experience, Hollowell achieves a visual interpretation of life that transcends the physically specific and reaches for something meditative and spiritual.

Hollowell’s trademark biomorphic paintings about her relationship to her body, sex, and orgasm borrow a useful metaphor from architecture and from these Burning Man experiences.

While a person might at first see a building, an architect designs for the experience in the building: one’s life; grabbing a cup of coffee; shopping; mating.  A tribe of burners build their parade floats in a similar way. On the surface it titillates or amazes, but there is always a deeper functional purpose: to be a sauna of cosmic energy; to be a private meditative space for finding new identity; to be a sensual soak of people, spirit and purpose.

Hollowell does a similar thing with the subjects of her paintings. The paintings end up being not only an ornament displaying the sexual body electric, but also a meditation on the pleasure of sensual and erotic wisdom. They invite in as much as they swaddle the viewer in an undulating and coaxing interplay of light and colour.

Linked Lingams (yellow, green, blue, purple, pink), 2018

They are also not flat canvases. Hollowell incorporates hair, sawdust, and layers of other material into her painting, in a process that takes months of rendering, sanding and sculpting. The paintings are as much a textural experience as they are a visual delight.

In a small room in New York

In an interview Zoom call she gave to PAFA in January of this year, Hollowell refers repeatedly to her experience of making her early paintings by talking about how she was living in a small apartment in New York.

The early generation paintings before 2015-16, and her first paintings shown at shows in New York and at Pace Galleries around the world, present abstract features of the female and male genitalia in ways that even a speeding adolescent boy riding past on his paper route bicycle would recognise. But they also invite you in and take you through a Rorschach experience of orgasmic swirls, curls, waves and permutations that deliver the viewer into a meditation on the holy, or the spiritual light within orgasm, among other things.

*Lick Lick in Orange and Blue (2015) *is one such painting.

Lick Lick in Orange and Blue (2015)

This painting creates a* tete a tete* meditation between an abstract, formal presentation of the body, which serves the purpose of delivering the viewer to the core of light at its center, something that one might interpret as the soul. The third member of this sensual and erotic experience might well be considered to be the experience of eros itself as the viewer encounters some kind of wisdom transmitted by the subject matter itself.  

Hollowell has said herself: “Often there will be a light source‚ a stream of light that penetrates the entire dimension of the canvas. The light moves through the action in the painting‚ or the action is coming out of the stream of light. Those areas of chiaroscuro and high-intensity light are places of arousal. The pulsing light is like the body's energy—the pulsing of sex or the pulsing of the heart. During climax it feels like there's a bright light pouring out of me‚ like I'm going to explode. That's the kind of light energy I want to create in my paintings."

This large [64 x 48 in. (162.6 x 121.9 cm.)] oil on linen invitation is perhaps best interpreted as a visual metaphor, a type of pleasure poem. It takes the viewer into the physical first, much like a lyrical poet might talk about the things she sees, dotting the lines of the verses with visual references and suggestive metaphors for deeper and more subconscious experiences or ideas.

By focusing on an abstract, formalised feature of her own anatomy, Hollowell suggests the frisson of sex is constantly alive in the body.* *The lines of the vulva wobble and undulate, offering mimicry of nature, but also suggesting the action of orgasm and the constant movement of interpretation.

Just as language is a menage a trois between the desire to know, the desire to name and the objective facts of existence, the paint and light in Hollowell’s canvas create an intimate connection between matter (the body) and light (the soul), and experience (pleasure’s wisdom).

Her brush, her paint, and her texture are teasing us out of the analytical shell we hide under, to enjoy and loll about in the light of the world. 

In Lick Lick, the blue pulsing light is this light, held at the core, which in orgasmic bursts out to illuminate our selves from within, offering a clearer light with which we can see and know.

Hollowell’s paintings do not stop at the body erotic or this orgasm light. 

There are also in her paintings references to different schools of painting from which she draws her inspiration: The Transcendentalist Painting Group; Magritte; Ashile Gorky, the Dadaists and the Man Ray Active art practitioners.

And the subject matter goes beyond simply sex.

Looking through the Hollowell oeuvre,  what started out as serial encounters with orgasm and inner light earlier in her career has journeyed into motherhood, fertility, gender, identity, and politics.

Hung (down) by Loie Hollowell

In Hung (down), “Hollowell presents an upturned figure pressured—deformed, even—by two red-tipped phalluses. The work was her reaction to the media’s sexist coverage of the first female presidential nominee of a major party in [the United States,” wrote Elizabeth Buhe, in *Art in America, *27 January 2017.

In traveling through aesthetics in this way, the mind finds wisdom, a wisdom that is charged with the delight in being part of this experience of being made of many things; of being made in pleasure, as being a byproduct of eros itself. 

Loie Hollowell is a Northern California painter who now lives and works in New York City. Her mother was a Burner who traveled to Burning Man nearly every year. Hollowell tagged along, and in doing so, grew up witnessing parades of colour and light in barren spaces throbbing with electric and sensual vibrations.

By focusing on a formal abstraction of elemental functions of human experience, Hollowell achieves a visual interpretation of life that transcends the physically specific and reaches for something meditative and spiritual.

Hollowell’s trademark biomorphic paintings about her relationship to her body, sex, and orgasm borrow a useful metaphor from architecture and from these Burning Man experiences.

While a person might at first see a building, an architect designs for the experience in the building: one’s life; grabbing a cup of coffee; shopping; mating.  A tribe of burners build their parade floats in a similar way. On the surface it titillates or amazes, but there is always a deeper functional purpose: to be a sauna of cosmic energy; to be a private meditative space for finding new identity; to be a sensual soak of people, spirit and purpose.

Hollowell does a similar thing with the subjects of her paintings. The paintings end up being not only an ornament displaying the sexual body electric, but also a meditation on the pleasure of sensual and erotic wisdom. They invite in as much as they swaddle the viewer in an undulating and coaxing interplay of light and colour.

Linked Lingams (yellow, green, blue, purple, pink), 2018

They are also not flat canvases. Hollowell incorporates hair, sawdust, and layers of other material into her painting, in a process that takes months of rendering, sanding and sculpting. The paintings are as much a textural experience as they are a visual delight.

In a small room in New York

In an interview Zoom call she gave to PAFA in January of this year, Hollowell refers repeatedly to her experience of making her early paintings by talking about how she was living in a small apartment in New York.

The early generation paintings before 2015-16, and her first paintings shown at shows in New York and at Pace Galleries around the world, present abstract features of the female and male genitalia in ways that even a speeding adolescent boy riding past on his paper route bicycle would recognise. But they also invite you in and take you through a Rorschach experience of orgasmic swirls, curls, waves and permutations that deliver the viewer into a meditation on the holy, or the spiritual light within orgasm, among other things.

*Lick Lick in Orange and Blue (2015) *is one such painting.

Lick Lick in Orange and Blue (2015)

This painting creates a* tete a tete* meditation between an abstract, formal presentation of the body, which serves the purpose of delivering the viewer to the core of light at its center, something that one might interpret as the soul. The third member of this sensual and erotic experience might well be considered to be the experience of eros itself as the viewer encounters some kind of wisdom transmitted by the subject matter itself.  

Hollowell has said herself: “Often there will be a light source‚ a stream of light that penetrates the entire dimension of the canvas. The light moves through the action in the painting‚ or the action is coming out of the stream of light. Those areas of chiaroscuro and high-intensity light are places of arousal. The pulsing light is like the body's energy—the pulsing of sex or the pulsing of the heart. During climax it feels like there's a bright light pouring out of me‚ like I'm going to explode. That's the kind of light energy I want to create in my paintings."

This large [64 x 48 in. (162.6 x 121.9 cm.)] oil on linen invitation is perhaps best interpreted as a visual metaphor, a type of pleasure poem. It takes the viewer into the physical first, much like a lyrical poet might talk about the things she sees, dotting the lines of the verses with visual references and suggestive metaphors for deeper and more subconscious experiences or ideas.

By focusing on an abstract, formalised feature of her own anatomy, Hollowell suggests the frisson of sex is constantly alive in the body.* *The lines of the vulva wobble and undulate, offering mimicry of nature, but also suggesting the action of orgasm and the constant movement of interpretation.

Just as language is a menage a trois between the desire to know, the desire to name and the objective facts of existence, the paint and light in Hollowell’s canvas create an intimate connection between matter (the body) and light (the soul), and experience (pleasure’s wisdom).

Her brush, her paint, and her texture are teasing us out of the analytical shell we hide under, to enjoy and loll about in the light of the world. 

In Lick Lick, the blue pulsing light is this light, held at the core, which in orgasmic bursts out to illuminate our selves from within, offering a clearer light with which we can see and know.

Hollowell’s paintings do not stop at the body erotic or this orgasm light. 

There are also in her paintings references to different schools of painting from which she draws her inspiration: The Transcendentalist Painting Group; Magritte; Ashile Gorky, the Dadaists and the Man Ray Active art practitioners.

And the subject matter goes beyond simply sex.

Looking through the Hollowell oeuvre,  what started out as serial encounters with orgasm and inner light earlier in her career has journeyed into motherhood, fertility, gender, identity, and politics.

Hung (down) by Loie Hollowell

In Hung (down), “Hollowell presents an upturned figure pressured—deformed, even—by two red-tipped phalluses. The work was her reaction to the media’s sexist coverage of the first female presidential nominee of a major party in [the United States,” wrote Elizabeth Buhe, in *Art in America, *27 January 2017.

In traveling through aesthetics in this way, the mind finds wisdom, a wisdom that is charged with the delight in being part of this experience of being made of many things; of being made in pleasure, as being a byproduct of eros itself.