Ryan Kreitzer

VAT 300

8/29/22

Artist Profile

Adrian Holt

Adrian Holt cultivates skills. Since coming to the Cleveland Institute of Art Holt has

looked to his peers to improve his pieces and inspire his new work. Holt’s paintings and

drawings focus heavily on narrative, featuring strikingly vivid figures and dynamic compositions

and gestures. This focus on his peers has allowed not only Holt’s art to progress greatly, but his

perspective on art as well.

Holt began art making in part due to his cousin, and their sketchbook. Inside Adrian saw

elaborate sketches of character art; detailed, and elaborate characters in dramatic and climactic

poses inspired Holt to create. Starting out, Adrian chose to work in black and white, working on

his fundamentals and trying to get better. As Holt began his time at CIA, he began to see his

peers as healthy competition. Moving from high school to college made him realize that he had

become a “big fish in a bigger pond”, and needed to draw from those around him to improve his

skill. Seeing many different styles and perspectives gave Adrian the opportunity to attempt new

methods and techniques that he had never thought to try before.

If you were to ask Adrian plainly what themes exist over his body of work, he would tell

you that there are no themes. “They really salivate over that thing”, Adrian says about deeper

meaning in his art. Holt will tell you that his work exists outside of a central theme and he makes

what he thinks looks good. But one thing he will tell you about what his art is about is narrative.
Drama and action motivate Adrian to make pieces, and those pieces exist as windows into those

narratives that he’s trying to tell.

Holt’s paintings feature vivid colors, dreamlike lighting, and usually some sort of

indication of a third party, or just an outer world in general that places the snapshot in a world. In

Blue and Orange both figures have exaggerated expressions, almost cartoonish in a way, as our

blue figure looks out of frame, at something we can’t see. The orange figure looks in the

direction of blue, laughing at a joke or absurdity that we just missed. These two characters are

engaging in a story together, a shared moment in a shared world separated from ours. The world

and experience that they are sharing may be different from ours, but they are wholly the same as

ours as they came from us.

This fascination and almost reverence for narrative in art, and his curiosity about other art

forms, Adrian was able to discover custom shoes. Immediately he was drawn to this “different

kind of canvas” as a new way to characterize not figures on a page, but on real people. Having

the ability to create these pieces of “walking art” allows Adrian to tell new stories to new

audiences. The wearability of this art is also important to him, as that immediately turns the art

piece into a piece of character. These pieces of character are then able to tell a story about the

person wearing them all on their own. Not only that but it is able to allow him to create

something that isn’t limited by four white walls.

Holt’s artwork isn’t limited to 2D media, as the piece School Supplies shows his ability to

work in sculpture. The narrative involved in the piece is one much darker and grimer than is

being told in some of Holt’s other pieces. The small box containing imagery of so much different

weaponry paints quite the loud picture. A picture that is all too familiar to modern artists and

modern art students especially.

 One of the things Adrian believes about narrative is that it can exist outside of ourselves,

much like other art forms. And when we allow narratives to exist outside ourselves they’re able

to take on new forms and lives. Having a story inside or behind a piece of artwork is ultimately

what drives Adrian forward. For him it “makes 2D art come alive”, and I couldn’t agree more.