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| The Slip, 1968 | Under Trees |
1907 - 2007
Draughtsman, painter and printmaker, born Tottenham, North London – the son of a Viennese-born lithographer. As a child, he often drew on the newspapers and packets in his grandmother’s sweet shop.
After leaving school he was apprenticed to his father’s London firm. In addition, he honed his artistic talent at evening classes, where he chalked up over 1,000 hours of life drawing. He went on to study at London and Central School of Art and Crafts and the Regent Street Polytechnic before taking up a teaching post at Hornsey College of art.
War service saw a posting to peaceful northern India, where he spent much time painting the spectacular scenery. He finished out the war as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery producing camouflage work and, in the weeks after VE Day, lithographs of anti-doodlebug defences on the Suffolk coast, whilst stationed at Walberswick.
Holzer’s artistic talent was also put to use painting murals on the walls of the officers’ mess in nearby Southwold. Eventually, he was ordered to paint out the resulting mermaids and naids, since the local ladies mistook these for pornography and refused to enter the room.
Returning to London, Holzer resumed teaching, and served as head of printmaking at Hornsey until retirement in 1968.
All of Holzer’s leisure time was spent painting and drawing. He excelled in capturing quiet scenes of London streets. He also loved the countryside, and made many river trips along the Thames and the Wye resulting in a series of lithographs and etchings.
In 1966, he moved to an idyllic part of south Norfolk with views along the Yare valley. Here he savoured a working, living landscape of gardens, fields, allotments and meadows including a 20-acre field, which he mortgaged his house to buy and turned into a nature reserve.
With a dead spot in one eye from the age of 30, Holzer was diagnosed with macular degeneration in his 60s and registered blind from 1993. However, he adapted his techniques to his progressive loss of vision, abandoning watercolours for pastels and oils. He used a variety of magnifying glasses and lights as well as squinting sideways at evolving works, to make best use of his peripheral vision. Whilst his sense of colour deteriorated, his ability to convey light sharpened. His focus became increasingly towards the essential elements of each painting until finally moving into the period of his blind drawings. For these, he would slowly work out the completed drawing in his head over many days, before taking up charcoal, chalk, ballpoint, a fat felt-tip pen and a solitary pastel and executing the image in a single session, working swiftly from top to bottom of his piece of paper, and rarely reworking.
His works are held in many public collections including the Government Art Collection, the British Museum, Toledo Museum of Modern Art (Ohio). He also won commissions from Norwich and Lincoln cathedrals and the National Trust.
Exhibitions Include:
Royal Academy; Royal Society of Painter-Etchers; Roland Gallery; Browse and Delbanco; Redfern Gallery; Piccadilly Gallery; Usher Gallery, Lincoln; The Works, Beccles