Holden Willard
Bio
Holden Willard (b. 1999) is a painter based in Portland, Maine. Willard was born in Rockport, Maine, and graduated from Montserrat College of Art in 2021 with a BFA in painting. His paintings were selected to exhibit in the 2025 As We Are group exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art and in the 2023 Biennial at Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
Principally a figurative artist, Willard paints friends and family in a dialogue between past, present, and future. The dynamic surfaces of his paintings show steps of mark making, drawing and erasure. This visual history and change is an analogy to how we perceive people and to the subject's own evolving narrative. Willard's work centers on a coming-of-age in Maine. He uses images of home, adventures of youth, and emotions of friendship and fear and anxiety. Willard's considered use of color in line and washes, and his attention to posture and gaze, infuse his paintings with mood and feeling in an effort to say the unsaid.