Primordial Periodicals:
the childhood comic book art of Jeffrey Scott Holland
View the exhibit More about JSH
When R.C. and Elwanda Holland, parents of neo-expressionist/stuckist painter Jeffrey Scott Holland cleaned out their garage and opened boxes that hadn't seen the light of day since their last move in 1981, they found a treasure trove of Holland's childhood homemade comic books dating from 1968-1978.
When Holland's eyes gazed upon these ancient works not seen in years, his face lit up in astonishment. "I felt like the reincarnation of an Egyptian Pharoah breaking into his own tomb after centuries", he said later.
But aside from their historic value and marginal interest to Holland's admittedly limited audience, are these tiny crude handmade comic books really Art? We say, emphatically, yes. Many artist's childhood works are less than edifying. Dali's early works give us zero foreshadowing of what was to come, and even Basquiat's childhood works are less interesting - and less childlike - than his mature body of work. But Holland's show patterns that are, startlingly, directly connected to his current adult work. It's exactly as Holland has oft stated: "I have always been me."
Comic Books were always the primary mode of expression for young Holland's art, even from his very first drawings, made at the age of one. (Yes, one. He began reading, writing and drawing at an impossibly precocious age, and was the subject of a 1969 Louisville Courier-Journal article by Betty Tevis Balke, entitled "Gifted Have Problems, Too".
It's enough that he was drawing at all while his peers were still fingerpainting stick figures, but simply amazing that he was making crude stabs at perspective, distance, and faces shown at three-quarter angle. Not to mention writing plots that, though simplistic, aren't far from the honed reduction one finds in many a classic underground comic. The comics are riddled with references to Marvel Comics to the extent that it almost seems like a hip deconstructionist satire rather than an earnest child's attempt to emulate that which it admired.
It pays to never throw anything away.