Holly Rom [RA 2012]

First name: Holly ;
Middle name:  ;
Last name: Rom ;

Member: Resident artist member ; 
Begin: 2012 ;
End: n/a ;

Biography:

Holly Meeker Rom paints colorful, gestural, works on paper in watercolor and gouache. Her subjects include architecture, gardens, parks by the sea, rocks and brooks, trees, plants, shells, flowers and human figures.

Ann Aptaker, curator of the exhibition Full Tilt Boogie Woogie, The New York Artists Circle, 2021, notes “Holly Meeker Rom’s dancers come to the viewer as in dreams: her “Ballerina in Red” dancing in a watercolor mist; her dancers in “Eurythmy,” arms extended, immersed in rituals of movement as old as time. The dancer in “Ballerina in Red” embodies the contradictory requirements of ballet: control and freedom. Her right leg poised on its toes, her left leg in a graceful bend, her arms extended in gentle arcs, the ballerina is in complete control of every bone and muscle in her body, and yet she is poised in a delicate balance of lightness. Rom’s use of watercolor, a medium which also requires mastery of control in order to allow freedom of the brush, is the perfect language for the image.

As the art critic for Gallery & Studio magazine wrote, ”No artist demonstrates more effectively than Holly Meeker Rom how watercolor lends itself to capturing fleeting qualities of light…Like all the best exponents of this demanding medium, Rom makes the bare paper a prominent element in her compositions…Her sure command of her medium enables her to convey its essence with an impressive abstract freedom that makes her paintings much more than literal interpretations of nature.”

Holly has shown at Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, L.I. where the critic of Long Island Newsday called her landscapes, “voluptuous.” Her work was also included and reviewed in a show titled, Après Monet: the Water Lily in Contemporary Art at the Hammond Museum in New York. The reviewer said, “in Lily Pads, Rom has obscured that place where nature leaves off and art begins, deliciously so.” She has won awards in many shows. At the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT, she won the top award for water media in 2003, and at the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club Annual, a show juried by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art held at Manhattan’s National Arts Club, she won an award in 2004, 2007 and 2010. Her work has been published in full color on the Oct. 11, 1985 cover of The Washington Post Weekend Section. She was a docent at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1997-2014 and has traveled the world extensively. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and has a master’s degree in painting from American University in Washington, D.C. and a bachelor’s degree from Mills College in CA. She is a professional member of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club.

https://www.hollymeekerrom.com/

Artworks: