Something About Betty

From 1993 through 1998, I was fortunate to study painting and drawing with Sands Point’s Betty Holliday.

Betty Holliday, an eccentric Long Island beauty, graduated with her Masters in Art History from Harvard. She was also proud to have studied with American modernist painter, Vaclav Vytlacil, the renowned instructor who taught at the Art Students League in New York City. After embarking on a career as a successful painter and photographer, Holliday, an excellent and popular teacher, instructed scores of Long Islanders in drawing and painting the figure in space.

Betty Holliday, who counted Louise Nevelson among her colleagues, became well known in the art community when an early ink drawing was shown in a 1956 juried exhibition, “Recent Drawings USA,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Besides Holliday, the well received show included Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers and Larry Rivers. She also gained renown for taking photographs and writing art reviews for Art News magazine. After her marriage to a Long Island surgeon, Betty settled into an eccentric, art focused life in a rambling ranch house near the water in Sands Point. The marriage didn’t last, but the art making continued until huge canvas portraits and immense figurative drawings took over every room in the house.

Holliday was said to be the master of expressive line, using boldly swooping gesture to capture the dejection of a figure or the sexuality of a flower. In 1981, when Holliday was at the peak of her artistic endeavor, Helen Harrison, writing in the New York Times, aptly described Holliday as, “….an artist for whom drawing is the esthetic cornerstone, the basis for everything she creates and expresses. Whether using oils, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal or ink, she is first and foremost a draftsman….As Monet used color, so Miss Holliday uses line to weave a tapestry of pictorial richness that shifts back and forth between representation and abstraction.” (NY Times, Dec. 6, 1981).

For many years, Betty Holliday taught drawing and painting at the Roslyn Museum of Fine Arts in Long Island, and in her home studio in Sands Point. I took advantage of both, and I can still hear her voice in my head, commenting on space, line and composition. “Never say, I like it,” – “that’s meaningless,” she said. Instead, “…ask yourself what have I said, how have I said it? What is the scale? What are the materials?” “A work of art,” Holliday emphasized, “is a failure unless it appears to have always existed on the page or canvas.” The result, she said, must look as thought it happened. “Art that looked as though it had been constructed is a failure.”

Holliday taught from the 1960’s through the 1990’s leaving a legacy of artistic integrity on Long Island. She passed away on April 3, 2011.