Mike Holsomback’s paintings resist a fixed reading. Moving between abstraction and representation, images emerge, disappear, and return transformed through layers of color, mark, surface, and association.
A motel becomes a stage. A poolside becomes theater. Familiar figures drift toward the strange. What begins as an image becomes a narrative, but one the artist deliberately leaves unfinished.
Holsomback’s work is layered, expressive, and often playful, moving between abstraction, recognizable imagery, humor, memory, and the unexpected. Materials, marks, fragments, and images accumulate into works that reward looking closely, revealing new relationships and narratives along the way.
"I construct with a varied vocabulary of abstraction and representation, of changing styles and techniques. The imagery is discovered and replaced and often reborn," Holsomback explains. "Images come like flashes and are thrown into a new world of color, mark, and surface, without full regard to their narrative implications."
His new solo exhibition, opening this Saturday, August 1st, at the The 109 Gallery in Historic Downtown Chickamauga, celebrates an artist who has kept making, experimenting, and following the work wherever it leads.
And there is something wonderfully fitting in the exhibition’s title. One Monkey Don’t Stop the Show speaks to persistence, but also to the unruly nature of the the world, the studio, moments between brush stroke and the things that make up daily life.
Across more than three decades of practice, Holsomback has developed a visual language rooted in experimentation and an enduring curiosity about what painting can become. Here, storytelling is less about arriving at an answer than creating the conditions for discovery. Holsomback sets the stage, then allows the painting to take on a life of its own.
The result is a body of work that is playful without being simple, theatrical without resolving into spectacle, and narrative without telling us what to believe. We are invited to enter these strange and lively worlds, spend time among their characters, and find our own place within the story.
A longtime artist and educator, Holsomback brings decades of making, teaching, observation, and lived experience into a practice spanning painting, collage, and mixed media. A retired professor from Chattanooga State Community College, he has been an enduring presence within the region’s arts community, influencing generations of artists while continuing to develop a visual language distinctly his own.