Circling Darkness: AIDS, Fire, & Death (aged 22 years ongoing)
I wanted to start this series of examples of paintings that I did during the AIDS epidemic with two sweet and happy paintings. When this horrific plague started I was young and in a new relationship, and in a new home: Oakland, California. I was experiencing a freedom and acceptance, a moment of relaxed breath and friendship: exploring new music; ushering at the San Francisco Symphony with my best friend; hiking in Point Reyes, and using those hikes to talk about spirituality, art, and philosophies of being—the whys, hows, who and what we were. So there was the joy of exploration, the possibilities of life were wide and open. But, then layered on top, there began to creep in a terror, death and despair.
One day I returned home to the little in-law cottage we lived in and found the garage, which was our studio (one side for B’s weaving and gardening, one side for my art) had been partially burned down. The firemen mopping up said it had been caused by the extension cord we had strung from the house for power. Later, looking at the damage, I picked up a painting out of the water—a god image—and found that it had been painted over. Looking further with a sickening feeling I found my paints had been opened and systematically dumped out all over my drawing table. Looking up I could see more paintings on the wall that had been painted over. It had been done with intention. This put a dark pall over our little oasis. A week later “they” came back and burned our studio completely to the ground. Bringing our smoked and singed belongings with us, we found another neighborhood to live in through friends.
Soon, back in the City, my friends started becoming weirdly ill with purple spots on their skin, or something like fur coating their throats. I started withdrawing emotionally, becoming cocooned. Overwhelmed by circumstance, I painted a series of black landscapes and black still lifes in a new basement studio. Then my mother died, her liver failing at fifty. I was twenty-five.
While working at the symphony, the ritual had become for the men to change into our tuxes in the bathroom. As more died we would cry in there, and hold onto each other for comfort and support. I remember a friend throwing up in the sink because another friend had just died, and he didn’t even know he was sick. More and more were dying faster and faster. Friends were committing suicide.
During this time, with some money my mother had left, I fled to New Mexico and painted for two winters, staying at my friends' home and gallery while they followed the southern art fairs and visited family. Withdrawn and isolated, I walked the land and learned of the ancient indigenous culture. I painted with earth and stones, photographs and sheet metal. I painted on un-stretched canvas which I stretched like skin, and used leather for frames from the shop next door. But even there I could not hide from the plague. It reached me there darkly. So I had to come back, get tested, and face the present.
I found seasonal communal home: a group of grieving, dancing, healing gay men’s retreats to go to five times a year, way out on the land in the woods, on the mountain tops. There I would silently put these paintings up, and sit in ritual Circles. These retreats, along with my new partner in Oakland, became my family, and slowly I came out of my shell. The last few paintings represent my reemergence (from a larger series). I used the metaphor of emerging out of the ground and reconnecting with self, sun, air, and life. The mural-sized work is an invitation to return to living, to the open air, to unbury the spirit living within. The last painting in this cycle returns again to a young sweet couple.
May they have a peaceful life.
Scott Holloway
Oakland, CA
2019
