Today we’d like to introduce you to Saira Holland.
Hi Saira, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I have been a maker all my life. My earliest memories are of making tiny books or playdough food for my dolls or drawing little doodles on gum wrappers and folding them into tiny paper cranes. I was constantly creating something. My parents being artists themselves enveloped me with art from a very young age. I was born in Houston, Texas, where my dad worked at the Museum of Fine Arts. I loved visiting him there because the space felt so special, almost sacred. I got to go behind the scenes and see how art was prepared for display. Walking through the gallery as a small child was like walking through a cathedral, sublime and serene. I still get the same feeling any time I visit a museum.
We moved to Austin when I was four and I was raised in the creative and unique environment the city provided. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and spent a lot of her time making things for and with my younger brother and I. She sewed every Halloween costume, hot-glued every diorama and even had a small business with my dad creating highly detailed, to-scale models for lawyers for accident cases. Every summer, she would get my younger brother and I into art classes together. He was always creative as well but ended up getting his masters in physics. His interests in science and space always inspired me and I was constantly asking him questions about the stars, multiverses and quantum mechanics.
When I was fourteen, my family relocated to Traverse City, Michigan. As a perhaps slightly lonely teen, I persistently filled sketchbook after sketchbook and poured over the art books that occupied our family’s bookshelves. I was especially drawn to the art deco and nouveau movements as well as illustrations in old children’s books and graphic novels (not to mention, my dad’s old sketchbooks). When I went to art school at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan I had trouble narrowing down my focus. With my interests spanning illustration, printmaking, drawing, painting, photography and jewelry design, I wanted to do it all. I started out in the illustration program but felt it was a bit too rigid. When I switched majors to fine arts painting, I was often told I was too illustrative and stylized for fine arts. Still I ended up with two bachelors degrees in fine art painting and photography and after college, moved back to Austin. My then future husband and I loved it there but struggled on minimum wage jobs. He got offered an amazing opportunity in Houston. We moved there and not long after, I got pregnant.
This was the plan. We always knew it was coming. And I know literally every parent ever has said this, still nothing can prepare you for it. As a stay at home mother the paradigm shift was abrupt and powerful. Priorities shifted dramatically and there was no time for anything but parental duty. When my son was born, I absolutely adored him but also I felt a loss of self and an unfamiliar sense of isolation. And I missed art. But as I became more comfortable with my new role as a mother, I began to find more time for myself and art again. By the time my daughter came along three years later, I was slowly beginning to build my art business by doing a show or market here and there and taking sporadic commissions for family portraits or logo design or whatever, wherever I could muster up interest. I found ways of working art into my life everyday whether it was working late into the night after putting the babies down to sleep or finger painting with them at the dinner table or crafting a fairy robot kitten costume for some very creative kids.
In 2017, hurricane Harvey hit and we decided that we were done with Houston. We had already been feeling a pull for a different lifestyle that we felt was unobtainable in the tightly packed suburbs of such a large metropolis. We felt we needed space and wanted family close so we bought a property with my parents just outside Austin. It was 5 acres of Texas thorny bramble with a single wide. Fast forward two years and we have two houses and two RVs housing my family, my parents, my grandfather and two close family friends. It was a huge undertaking but a labor of love that was well worth the effort.
As we built up our new life, my art career took a back seat to the myriad projects at hand. But with both of the kids entering school and the longest move ever finally coming to an end, I was able to unpack my studio into our new house two years after I had packed it up in Houston. I was ready to seriously pursue my passions. Then Covid hit. I was working on a large scale installation for SXSW when it was cancelled. I was lined up to have my first gallery opening that never happened. I was making connections and establishing myself in a thriving and supportive community of artists in my hometown. I felt like it all got ripped away just as I was getting a small grasp on it and I felt the loss of self once more.
The onset of quarantine meant that not only was I thrust back into stay-at-home-motherhood but I had the added frustration of virtual schooling to boot. As I watched my kids struggle with isolation, missing their normal, missing their friends, I pined for my artist community as well. But art was still there for me and more necessary than ever before. Amidst zoom meetings and fighting kid boredom, I sunk myself deep into my work. I drew every single day and poured over art books for inspiration once more. I felt it ever more important to put my work out there to feel some sort of social interaction. While my family has truly been a source of great comfort and support, my passion for creating has served as a form of meditation and escape as well as a vessel for connection as the world was forced to recoil.
Folded into my new body of work are all of the emotions that the last year induced. Quarantine brought with it heavy feelings of doom, fear and grief mixed with empathy, solace and gratitude. It was because of our new and sudden isolation I became focused on finding stillness and acceptance of circumstance from within myself stemming from the belief that everything exists internally. I think of my latest work as pseudo self portraiture. I see art as a reflection or window into a particular way of being. A record, transcending time and space. Drawing inspiration from religious iconography and mythology I sought to build a series that explores a mythos of mind while developing my own visual language. These vignettes portray solitary, stoic figures beckoning you, as if longing for connection beyond their own astral plane. Like stained glass windows simultaneously peering into and out of a temple of Self, She keeps order within and chaos at a distance. Flat colors and sharp lines reflect my own personal pursuit for control in a world of unknowns.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Art was very easy before and during college but I hit a dry spell after school. I think it was mostly creative exhaustion. I pushed myself hard in school and once it was done, I felt drained of ideas. A very frustrating feeling when it came so easily before. It was like having perpetual tip of the tongue syndrome with imagery. I was still able to do portrait commissions and small projects. Since I still had the desire to make things, I decided to collage and that helped me through it. doing something completely different and new forced me to use my creativity in new ways, break my own rules and let myself fail a little.
Truly the main struggle has been adjusting to motherhood and finding ways to balance art business with family. I am a stay at home mom and my husband travels for his job and is gone half of each month so it’s all me half the time. It’s been this way for 10 years and it’s our normal, still it presents a lot of unique challenges. That being said, starting a small business with two babies would not have been possible without the support of my husband. In the 15 years we’ve been together he has been the biggest source of motivation and encouragement.
When my son was first born eight years ago the struggle was remembering to find time for me, especially when I was alone for weeks at a time. Trying to find any time for creativity came later, really once he had the capacity for being creative himself. Teaching him how to draw and paint helped me get back into art myself. I started getting into small arts and crafts fairs selling art and jewelry when my daughter was only two months old. As the kids gained their independence I was able to make more and more time for the business. But life also happens and I often had to push things to the back burner. Moving and starting out in a new city took so much time and I felt so restless and pent up in the 2 years that I didn’t have an art space. Once we finally settled in I was so excited to work, I had so many ideas and so much to art about. My son was in first grade and my daughter was about to start kindergarten in the fall and I would finally have real time.
Then Covid hit and virtual schooling took over a lot of our free time. The shutdown was difficult obviously, mostly the fear of all the unknowns weighed on us, especially with a multigenerational family set up. But looking back on it now, I am so thankful that we have so much space for the kids to play and family living with us to not feel so isolated during that time. And honestly my art would not be what it is without the experience of quarantine. It was challenging but we fared well through the storm. I got to see how resilient and flexible my kids are. We got so much time with each other in some of the best ways. We camped and had bonfires on our land. We slowed down and reveled in the here and now. And my art became more prolific than ever. Drawing became the outlet it was for me as a teenager, filling sketch book after sketchbook of ideas and researching new concepts and artists. Now my struggle is toning down the obsession and making time and room for family. There is always the lingering guilt that you are not doing enough for your kids but I also know the value of seeing your parents doing things for themselves.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a multifaceted figurative artist. I started out drawing and moved to oil painting in college. I have gone through phases of working with collage, watercolor, acrylic, charcoal and now ink and marker. I have always enjoyed mixing media. I am known for portraiture and through my career has gone from quite realistic to very controlled and graphic. I think it stems from my dad’s art who was a draftsman and industrial and graphic designer throughout my childhood.
I am most proud of my most recent body of work. It is more authentic than anything I’ve ever made. I feel that it really represents who I am and says it in my own unique voice. I have worked on honing in on my own personal visual language and mythos of mind through these pseudo self-portraits. When it resonates with another person, it is crystalized into honest shared emotion, communication on some transcendental level. And ultimately, that’s why art exists.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
My dad inspired me to be an artist. He exposed me to so many of my favorite artists and styles and always challenged me to look at the world through an artist’s or designer’s eyes. My mom inspired me to be a maker. She is an amazing creative problem solver and showed me that a stay at home mom can be and do so many things. That even though there is no instruction manual, challenges can be solved with creativity and flexibility. I have a wonderful tribe of supportive family members as well as amazing artist friends who have always encouraged me, but my husband is my absolute champion. There would be no business without him. He constantly pushes me and motivates me to strive for more.
Contact Info:
- Email: sairaholland@gmail.com
- Instagram: @sairaholland
- Other: www.sairaholland.etsy.com
