The art of an artist must be his own art. It is… always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one’s own, in one’s relation to the tool, the material and the colors.

Happy Birthday Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde (August 7, 1867 – April 13, 1956) was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great watercolor painters of the 20th century. He is known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.

Nolde’s intense preoccupation with the subject of flowers reflect his continuing interest in the art of Vincent Van Gogh.

He was born as Emil Hansen near the village of Nolde, (now part of the Danish municipality of Burkal), Province of Schleswig-Holstein. He was raised on a farm; his parents, devout Protestants, were Frisian and Danish peasants. Even as a boy he drew and painted. From 1902 he called himself after his birthplace.

Between 1884 and 1891, he studied to become a carver and illustrator in Flensburg. He spent his years of travel in Munich, Karlsruhe and Berlin. From 1906 to 1907 he was a member of the artist group Die Brücke (The Bridge).

Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from the early 1920s, having become a member of its Danish section. He expressed negative opinions about Jewish artists, and considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style. This view was shared by some other members of the Nazi party, notably Joseph Goebbels.

However Hitler rejected all forms of modernism as “degenerate art”, and Nolde’s work was officially condemned by the Nazi regime. Until that time he had been held in great prestige in Germany. Over 1000 of his works were removed from museums. Some were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, despite his protests, including (later) a personal appeal to Nazi gauleiter Baldur von Schirach in Vienna. He was not allowed to paint—even in private—after 1941. Nevertheless, during this period he created hundreds of watercolors, which he hid. He called them the “Unpainted Pictures”.

In 1942 Nolde wrote:

“There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones…and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.” (quoted in Nolde-Forbidden Pictures (exhibition catalogue), Marlsborough Fine Art Ltd., London, 1970,p.9)

After World War II, Nolde was once again honoured, receiving the German Order of Merit, the country’s highest civilian decoration. He died in Seebüll (now part of Neukirchen).

Apart from paintings, Nolde’s work includes many prints, often in color and watercolor paintings of various sizes, including landscapes, religious images, flowers, stormy seas and scenes from Berlin nightlife. A famous series of paintings covers the German New Guinea Expedition, visiting the South Seas, Moscow, Siberia, Korea, Japan, and China. The Schiefler Catalogue raisonné of his prints describes 231 etchings, 197 woodcuts, 83 lithographs, and 4 hectographs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Nolde

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.

Happy Birthday Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928. In 1945 he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) where he majored in pictorial design. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he found steady work as a commercial artist. He worked as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker and did advertising and window displays for retail stores such as Bonwit Teller and I. Miller. Prophetically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled “Success is a Job in New York.”

Throughout the 1950s, Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Director’s Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In these early years, he shortened his name to “Warhol.” In 1952, the artist had his first individual show at the Hugo Gallery, exhibiting Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. His work was exhibited in several other venues during the 1950s, including his first group show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1956.
The 1960s was an extremely prolific decade for Warhol. Appropriating images from popular culture, Warhol created many paintings that remain icons of 20th-century art, such as the Campbell’s Soup Cans, Disasters and Marilyns. In addition to painting, Warhol made several 16mm films which have become underground classics such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job. In 1968, Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into Warhol’s studio, known as the Factory, and shot the artist. The attack was nearly fatal.

At the start of the 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Maos, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. Warhol also published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again). Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.

The artist began the 1980s with the publication of POPism: The Warhol ’60s and with exhibitions of Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century and the Retrospectives and Reversal series. He also created two cable television shows, “Andy Warhol’s TV” in 1982 and “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes” for MTV in 1986. His paintings from the 1980s include The Last Suppers, Rorschachs and, in a return to his first great theme of Pop, a series called Ads. Warhol also engaged in a series of collaborations with younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring.

Following routine gall bladder surgery, Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987. After his burial in Pittsburgh, his friends and associates organized a memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York that was attended by more than 2,000 people.

In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had a major retrospective of his works.

http://www.warholfoundation.org/

The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 1994.

This biography was compiled by Martin Cribbs, Licensing Director.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

Happy Birthday George Tooker

George Tooker (b.1920) was born and raised until age seven in Brooklyn, New York and then in Belleport, Long Island in genteel upper class surroundings, he became a figure painter whose work reflects both his privileged circumstances and understanding of those less comfortable. His subjects, often of mixed sexual and racial features, are often obscured by heavy clothing and appear sagging and shapeless, trapped within their own dull worlds.

Some critics have described his style as “magic realism,” but he was not interested in the illusionary effects that many of the painters of that style espouse. He has regarded himself as more of a reporter or observer of society than an interpreter.

He took art lessons from Barbizon style painter, Malcolm Frazier, a friend of his mother and then attended Phillips Academy, a prep school, in Andover, Massachusetts where he had his first experience with lower classes because of his visits to the nearby textile community of Lawrence and Lowell.

He went to Harvard University where he studied English Literature but spent much time at the Fogg Art Museum. He was also active in socialist conscious organizations and distributed literature for radical political groups. In 1942, he graduated from Harvard and then entered the Marine Corps but was discharged due to a physical problem.

He studied at the Art Students League in New York City, beginning 1943 with Reginald Marsh. He also studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Harry Sternberg and in 1946, began spending time with Paul Cadmus as friend and pupil. Cadmus encouraged Tooker to work with tempera rather than the transparent wash technique taught by Marsh.

Tooker subsequently adopted a method of using egg yolk thickened slightly with water and then adding powdered pigment, a medium that was quick drying, tedious to apply, and hard to change once applied.

Fascinated by geometric design and symmetry, he works slowly, completely about two paintings a year because he spends much time searching for the underlying idea.

From 1965 to 1968, he taught at the Art Students League but has lived the later part of his life between Hartland, Vermont and Malaga, Spain. His first one-man exhibition was at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York in 1951.

http://www.leninimports.com/george_tooker.html

The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful.”

George Bellows

George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio on 19th August, 1882. At Ohio State University (1901-1904) Bellows was a talented baseball player but his first love was art and he moved to New York without graduating.

Bellows studied at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, leader of what became known as the Ashcan School. In 1906 he rented a studio and began painting scenes of everyday urban life. He also taught art at the Arts Students League.

Bellows developed a strong social conscious and in 1911 began contributing pictures to the radical journal, The Masses. Although rarely paid for his work, Bellows got the opportunity to work with other left-wing artists such as John Sloan, Stuart Davis and Boardman Robinson.

Bellows were deeply influenced by the events of the First World War and he completed a series of paintings and lithographs on the subject. He also produced several anti-war drawings for The Masses including the powerful attack on Woodrow Wilson and his Espionage Act, Blessed are the Peacemakers.

In 1919 Bellows moved to the Chicago Art Institute. He also illustrated novels including several by H. G. Wells. George Bellows died on 8th January, 1925 in New York after a neglected attack of appendicitis.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTbellows.htm

The intricacies of theology are not usually what concerns the artist. They’re concerned with the big, beautiful fundamentals.

Sister Wendy Beckett

She was born in South Africa and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. She became a nun in 1946 in the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She was sent to England to begin her novitiate and studied at St Anne’s College at Oxford, where she was awarded a Congratulatory First. Outside of her academic studies, she lived in a convent that maintained a strict code of silence.

After attending a teacher’s training college in Liverpool and earning a teaching diploma in 1954, she returned to South Africa to teach at the University of the Witwatersrand. Health problems in 1970 forced her to abandon teaching and return to England to live in the grounds of a Carmelite monastery. She spent many years translating Medieval Latin scripts before deciding to pursue her favourite subject of art in 1980.

Obtaining papal permission for her to become a Consecrated Virgin in 1970, Sister Wendy’s order arranged for her to live under the protection of the Carmelite nuns at their monastery at Quidenham, Norfolk, in the east of England. She leads a contemplative lifestyle, and currently lives in a caravan on the grounds. Besides receiving the Carmelite prioress and a nun who brings her provisions, she dedicates her life solely to monastic solitude and prayer, but allows herself two hours of work per day.

In 2007, Sister Wendy gave her blessing to Postcards From God, a new West End musical penned loosely around the events in her life.

She was caricatured by the character ‘Sister Bendy’ in the television show Eurotrash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Beckett

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time – condemned to painting for life

Happy Birthday John Sloan

Unlike most of the artists he knew in Philadelphia, John Sloan began not as an artist reporter (he worked too slowly for such deadlines) but as an illustrator and cartoonist. He imitated John Tenniel, the Punch artist who illustrated, among other books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And his decision to stay in America may have been enjoined by early marriage and a small income, but it was certainly confirmed by his early reading of Ruskin, who fulminated against the expatriate’s weakness, a rootless style. Illustrating connected him to American life. Some of Sloan’s most successful work would always be in black and white, whether etchings done for their own sake or illustrations for The Masses, a left wing magazine of social commentary that numbered Max Eastman and John Reed among its contributors. “I’m not a Democrat, I’m of no party. I’m for change for the operating knife when a party rots in power,” he declared in 1908. Though his sympathies were broadly socialist, he was wary of using his art as propaganda. He told one art critic that “I had no intention of working for any Socialist objects in my etchings and paintings though I do think it is the proper party to cast votes for at this time in America.” Significantly, he did not mention drawings for press reproduction, which were his real political vehicle. Sloan deeply admired French lithographers for their ruthless edge Gavarm, Steinlen, and especially Daumier. He could never honestly pretend to paint as a “man of the people,” a routine claim among socialist artists. “I never mingled with the people,” he would later say, “and the sympathy and understanding I have for the common people, as they are meanly called, I feel as a spectator of life.” There would always be a marked difference between the mordancy of Sloan’s political illustration and the benign, life affirming tone of his bas genre paintings of New York life, the “bits of joy,” as he called them, that he fixed on “with an innocent poet’s eye.” Now and then satire creeps into the paintings, as in Fifth Avenue, New York, with its press of upholstered women shoppers, or in the swells riding in their toadlike touring car in Gray and Brass, 1909. But Sloan’s painted world is generally amiable, a place full of fleshy, rosy girls on swings or in dance halls, Brooklyn Fragonard and Hester Street Renoir, chattering in front of the nickelodeon parlor or parading in Washington Square Park. Prone to the sentimental fallacy of treating the poor as figures in an urban pastorale, he wanted to see happiness everywhere, as in a 1906 diary note on one of his rambles on the Lower East Side:

Doorways of tenement houses, grimy and greasy door frames looking as though huge hogs covered with filth had worn the paint away and replaced it with matted dirt in going in and out. Healthy faced children, solid legged, rich full color to their hair. Happiness rather than misery in the whole life. Fifth Avenue faces are unhappy in comparison.

Harsh, dirty New York, 0. Henry’s “Baghdad on the Hudson,” had its demotic refuges: the new movie houses, the dance halls, and, very important for Sloan, McSorley’s Ale House, a dimly lit, sawdust floored, working class Irish tavern from which women were banned and whose eccentric annals would be recorded by Joseph Mitchell in his essay “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.” Sloan drank there regularly. It was to him and some of his friends what the more exalted Century Association was to the likes of Augustus Saint Gaudens. Some of his sketches still hang on its encrusted walls.

To some doctrinaire Marxists of the next generation, Sloan seemed unrealistic; and yet his work has an honest humaneness, a frank sympathy, a refusal to flatten its figures into stereotypes of class misery, that was certainly truer to the life of his subjects than theirs. He saw “his” people as part of a larger totality, the carnal and cozy body of the city itself, where even the searchlight installed on top of Madison Square Garden was “scratching the belly of the sky and tickling the building.” Sloan, not incidentally, was the first American to set down that image of urban eroticism which would become identified with Marilyn Monroe a girl with her skirt flaring in the hot blast of subway air. He was, as Willem de Kooning would say of himself in a rather different context many years later, “a slipping glimpser,” with a strong sense of the fleeting moment in which people are caught unawares: a woman pegging out the wash or lovers furtively embracing on a tenement roof, arguments on the fire escape, a girl stretching at a window – all of which could be seen from his studio on Twenty third Street, at the edge of the seedy Tenderloin district. He set them down in a brusquely spontaneous way, as reminiscent of Manet as his etchings and illustrations were of Gavarni. Sometimes a countercurrent of melancholy runs through them, and one thinks of Whistler: especially in the beautifully composed The Wake of the Ferry. Black stanchions and a tilted line of roof frame the cold blue evening sea from the stern of the Staten Island Ferry, as the blue in Whistler’s Thames was framed by Battersea Bridge (and both have the same root in Hiroshige). Daringly, Sloan counterposed the dark mass of the lone woman gazing astern against an open, swiftly brushed diamond pattern of the safety rail running out to the left, giving both balance and a sense of exposure: you see the wet light on the steel deck and feel the cold.

Though Sloan’s vision may seem modest compared to the more flamboyant Henri’s, younger painters got what they needed from him. His exuberant girls on the street were developed into regiments of overripe Coney Island cuties by Reginald Marsh, and his moments of voyeuristic detachment – Sloan didn’t like feeling detached from his human subjects, but that was part of city life – were amplified in Edward Hopper‘s glimpses of disconnected people staring out of windows at nothing in particular. Sloan’s own feelings extended neither to Marsh’s licentiousness nor to Hopper’s acute solipsism. This was a matter of temperament, not style.

– From Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/sloan.html

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Louise Nevelson (1900-1988 ) was an American abstract sculptor who explored both the density and transparency of materials. Her imagery was based on surrealist and cubist models.

Born in Kiev, Russia, Louise Nevelson emigrated with her family to the United States in 1905. She studied painting at the Art Students League, New York City, from 1929 through 1930 and traveled to Munich in 1931 to study with Hans Hofmann. In the mid-1930s, she turned to sculpture. In 1944, a piece designed an abstract sculpture composed of wood was shown to the public for the first time. In her early work she uses traditional materials and processes, and the images are almost exclusively figures, as in Mountain Woman (1949-1950).

By the mid-1950s Nevelson had emerged as a significant force in American sculpture. She constructed free-standing and relief pieces in wood that was finished in a monochromatic hue. Black Majesty (1955) is a series of totemic events vertically projecting from a horizontal pedestal. At the same time, the presentation of her pieces became environmental in scope, and she often exhibited them under a common title or theme, for example, The Royal Voyage (1956) with jagged forms sprawled on the floor as well as mounted on pedestals, The Forest (1957), and Moon Garden plus One (1958).

Some comparisons have been made between Nevelson’s work of the 1950s and concurrent attitudes in American painting, such as abstract expressionism. However, her compositions – while at first glance open-ended and freely handled in their assembled state – exhibit greater control, both formally and in their mythopoetic intent. Like some contemporary sculptors, she used cast-off materials; but her ingenious framing and pedestal devices, such as the relief, the box, and the column, in addition to her painterly concerns with light and dark, set her apart.

By the end of the 1950s Nevelson had moved from black and natural surfaces to overall white in the memorable series Dawn’s Wedding Feast. The scale of this exhibition seemed to forecast her large single wall reliefs Homage to 6,000,000 I (1964) and Homage to the World (1966). She, again returned to wood painted black (triangular) in Silent Music I (1964).

In the mid-1960s Nevelson came to prefer compositions with fewer elements, more rigidly controlling the relief space. She turned to such new materials as black lucite, aluminum, and magnesium, as in Atmosphere and Environment. In Environment she achieved open, freestanding structures that are as concerned with volume as with mass. In her work of the late 1960s she used welded vertical shapes; however, she also continued to execute wood constructions.

Nevelson’s artwork of the mid-1970s, she utilized cast paper in Dawn’s Presence (1976). The early 1980s and mid-1980s, she worked with detailed PHSColograms in Keeping Time with Fashion (1983) and painted wood in Mirror Shadow XI (1985). Remembered for her natural abstract sculptures, her death in 1988 marked a significant loss to the world of art.

http://www.answers.com/topic/louise-berliawsky-nevelson

Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man’s reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn’t bore

Happy Birthday Jean Dubuffet

French avant-garde painter, born in Le Havre (1901-1985). Dubuffet took over his father’s wine business in 1925, and withdrew from the art world. He stayed in the wine business until 1942, when he returned to painting, having developed a distinctive style of simple, primitive images in a heavily encrusted canvas. This style helped Dubuffet gain a worldwide reputation. Fascinated by the art of children and the insane, for which he coined the term art brut (“raw art”), he emulated its crude, violent energy in his own work. Critics soon applied the term art brut to Dubuffet’s paintings, rather than to their stylistic source as he had intended.

Many of Dubuffet’s works are assemblages (combining found objects and other elements into a three-dimensional integrated whole), as for example Door with Couch-Grass (1957, Guggenheim Museum, New York City), which is composed chiefly of fragments of paintings, grass, and pebbles. During the early 1960s, Dubuffet produced a series of paintings that resemble jigsaw puzzles, such as Nunc Stans (1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), in which tiny, obscure, closely spaced figures and faces dominate. His later work consists of large painted polyester resin sculptures. In all of his work the violence is tempered with elements of vitality and broad humor.

http://www.dubuffet.com/bio.htm

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

Happy Birthday Henry Moore

Henry Spencer Moore was born on July 30, 1898, in Castleford, Yorkshire. Despite an early desire to become a sculptor, Moore began his career as a teacher in Castleford. After military service in World War I he attended Leeds School of Art on an ex-serviceman’s grant. In 1921 he won a Royal Exhibition Scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Moore became interested in the Mexican, Egyptian, and African sculpture he saw at the British Museum. He was appointed Instructor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy in 1924, a post he held for the next seven years. A Royal Academy traveling scholarship allowed Moore to visit Italy in 1925; there he saw the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio and the late sculpture of Michelangelo. Moore’s first solo show of sculpture was held at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1928.

In the 1930s Moore was a member of Unit One, a group of advanced artists organized by Paul Nash, and was a close friend of Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and the critic Herbert Read. From 1932 to 1939 he taught at the Chelsea School of Art. He was an important force in the English Surrealist movement, although he was not entirely committed to its doctrines; Moore participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in 1936. In 1940 Moore was appointed an official war artist and was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to execute drawings of life in underground bomb shelters. From 1940 to 1943 the artist concentrated almost entirely on drawing. His first retrospective took place at Temple Newsam, Leeds, in 1941. In 1943 he received a commission from the Church of St. Matthew, Northampton, to carve a Madonna and Child; this sculpture was the first in an important series of family-group sculptures. Moore was given his first major retrospective abroad by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale of 1948.

Moore executed several important public commissions in the 1950s, among them Reclining Figure, 1956–58, for the UNESCO Building in Paris. In 1963 the artist was awarded the British Order of Merit. In 1978 an exhibition of his work organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain was held at the Serpentine in London, at which time he gave many of his sculptures to the Tate Gallery, London. Moore died in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, on August 31, 1986.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_114.html

Push yourself to the limit as often as possible

Happy Birthday Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer was born in Gallipolis, Ohio, on July 29, 1950. She studied in the liberal arts program at Duke University for two years before transferring to the University of Chicago. One year later, Holzer transferred to Ohio University, where she focused on fine art studies. There she received her B.F.A in painting and printmaking in 1972. She continued her education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she met Michael Glier, a fellow student, whom she married in 1984.

In 1977 Holzer was awarded an M.F.A. in painting by Rhode Island School of Design. It was during her graduate study at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program that she started experimentation in public art and words first entered her work. The first posters titled “Truisms” (1977-1979) surfaced throughout Manhattan. Her primary medium, language, structured her subsequent works.

The “Inflammatory Essays” text (1979-1982) was shown on street posters; “The Living Series” text (1980-1982), was cast on multiple bronze wall plaques.

Her work reached an even larger audience when she employed the large Spectacolor Board to convey her newly created “Survival Series” (1983-1985) text to New Yorkers frequenting the Times Square area in New York City. Ultimately she used electronic signboards and L.E.D. (light-emitting-diode) signs to reach the general public and museum audiences alike. In conjunction with the signs, she employed stone benches and sarcophagi etched with works titled “Under a Rock” (1986) and “Laments” (1989).

In 1990 Holzer was elected to represent the United States at the 44th Venice Biennale. Her installation, consisting of rooms filled with various texts including the latest series “Mother and Child” (1990). The texts, shown in multiple languages, pervaded the installation by way of L.E.D. signs, benches, and floor tiles. Holzer won the Leone d’Oro for best pavilion.

Her more recent work, “War” texts (1992), “Lustmord” (1993-1994) and “Erlauf Peace” texts (1995), focuses on the atrocities of war. The “War” text, first shown in installation at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland, speaks of wartime disaster. “Lustmord” is written from three different perspectives (the Observer, the Perpetrator and the Victim) regarding the rape of women in wartime. The “Lustmord” photographs, images of the text written on human skin, originally were presented in the magazine of the Suddeutsche Zeitung, reaching five hundred thousand readers. The ink used on the cover of this magazine contained women’s blood.

The “Erlauf Peace” texts memorialize lives lost and peace gained in World War II. Two commemorative installations, the Erlauf Peace Monument in Erlauf, Austria, and the Black Garden, in Nordhorn, Germany, incorporate the design of landscape with Holzer’s inscribed benches and stone pathways.

In addition to her permanent installations, Holzer’s latest projects explore the capacities of modern technology and its ability to reach a growing audience. Her Web site, Please Change Beliefs, makes her original “Truisms” texts available for altering.

Holzer resides in Hoosick with her husband and their daughter, Lili.

http://www.nytimes.com/specials/bosnia/forums/holzer.html