Internal Landscapes: Holly Zandbergen

Internal Landscapes is an undulating weather report. It portrays a balanced environment that enjoys the full range of seasons.
Seasons are observed as parallels of an internal and external experience. Thoughts are merely implied in the titles, suggesting enveloping moments that mimic elemental events and vice versa.
Holly’s application of colour is refreshingly bold. The paintings are vibrant and charged, depicting starkly different moods that are at once relatable, memorable and fleeting.
Holly’s painting style is deliberate and unrestrained, with the actual flow of mark making quite apparent within the individual work. Layers upon layers of paint add tangible peaks and craters, displaying remarkable depth that is deeply immersive and, despite the high frenetic energy under which they were created, meditative.
Internal Landscapes documents the symbiosis between interior thought and surrounding environment, oscillating between the two and blending them thoroughly into a harmonious whole.
“It’s the age at which you begin to notice how strange time is, how it repeats and returns, how the group you travel with is inexorably diminished. On you go, go you must, bound feet moving on damp ground. The weather isn’t looking good, time’s running out, a shrapnel of light falls whitely on the birch”.
- Olivia Laing —

‘This series represents a shift in my approach to painting where the pictorial elements of paint viscosity, colour, illusion of space and the mark as an expression have become more important than the depiction of a subject’s reality. I have realised that these qualities are subjects in themselves and they challenge me on a subconscious and intuitive level. The process of painting is of utmost importance and drives the painting from start to finish.’
Holly Zandbergen, Internal Landscapes