1947–

Kathleen Holder grew up in Milwaukee and graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1970 with a degree in fine art and, at her mother’s urging, the courses required to teach art. She taught art for about 10 years and was working in education when she had an experience that changed her life, and her art, forever.

“I had an extraordinary experience that I have been trying to recreate and share for more than 40 years,” said Holder. “It occurred during a yoga meditation class, and I was sort of suspended between sleep and consciousness, when I (that is . . . one aspect of myself) stood up and observed my own body lying on the floor in front of me. I (the standing figure) then reached down and peeled away a very thin gossamer veil impression of myself, and beneath the veil were thousands of filaments of pulsing white light.

“I thought ‘this is amazing. I never want to go back to ordinary, everyday reality. I want to stay right here,’” she said. “But the moment ended. My artist journey and my work have in large part been centered around that moment ever since.”

After earning her master’s in fine art at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1981, she moved to Little Rock and began working as a professor of fine arts at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Her seemingly simple pastel works have been described as transformative. “One feels in each work spiritual essences waiting to be comprehended. How the viewer submits his or her own temperament, experience and reservoir of associations to the query of those essences is the mystic adventure,” wrote William T. Henning, who was then curator of art at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, in 1989.

“Kathleen Holder plumbs the depths of metaphysics with her pastels. Reaching into the wells of contemplation she seeks wholeness, an arduous pursuit for complex humankind. The restless spirit finds repose as the deeps of her blues and reds give way to light . . . .” wrote Charlott Jones, curator of the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ A Personal Statement exhibit in 1991.

Describing her own work in this exhibit, Holder wrote, “My work is a translation, distillation, of dreams, visions, sensations, a recording of where I have been and what I have experienced both emotionally and spiritually. What intrigues me is mercurial stuff, temperature, atmosphere, light. I want to capture the feeling of a world wobbling back and forth between being and non-being. For me, the artist is an alchemist, magician, metaphysician, a medium who magically conjures the ineffable into form.”

Three of her paintings were among the 60 works by 20 Arkansas women artists in the A Personal Statement exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center. Juror Grace Glueck, an art reporter, writer, editor and critic long-associated with The New York Times, selected Holder as one of ten artists to exhibit work at NMWA in Washington, D.C., in 1992.

“The opening night in Washington was quite an event for a group of women artists,” said Holder. “The events they planned for us, the travel to and from Washington, it was all amazing. I don’t think there’s been anything like it before or since.

“Seeing my work on exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts was a confidence-boosting shot of adrenaline when I most needed it,” she said. “It served as a formal affirmation recognizing the merit and value of my work.”

Holder taught at UALR for 19 years and was named UALR professor emerita in 2000. “For my students, I saw my role as that of a flight instructor guiding young artists along their paths and encouraging them to stay honest,” she said.

“Throughout my career as an artist, my work has followed a reductive path moving from figuration and figurative abstraction toward a leaner and much more subtle minimalism,” said Holder. “Along the way I have tried to boil away excess to arrive at essence. Although I sometimes find inspiration in certain visual phenomenon, an expansive landscape or something I have observed in nature . . . I am not interested in re-creating or re-presenting the experience.”

In 1998, Holder received a scholarship from the Arkansas Committee, which enabled her to spend several days working one-on-one with a master printmaker at Hand Graphics in Santa Fe, N.M., creating a small body of monoprints.

“I had had a really rough time right before this, so the opportunity to travel to Santa Fe was very important to me,” said Holder. “The week there was truly a blessing. It was good medicine for my creativity and my self-esteem, and it provided an incentive to keep working.”

Two of her 1990 pastel on graphite tablet works, Alchemist Diary: Invocation to the Moon and Alchemist Diary: Invocation Seeking Signifier, were on display at NMWA from January 1 to February 28, 2000, in one of the museum’s From the States exhibitions, and she was profiled in the museum’s Holiday 1999 Women in the Arts magazine.

Holder now lives in Buda, Texas, and continues, in her life and in her art, to investigate psychology and mysticism and to help others on their own journeys through metamorphosis into selfhood.