DESCRIPTION OF WORK

---

Julee Holcombe’s painterly, elegant and subtly comic photography—predominantly portraits and landscapes—is equal parts reality and illusion. Though her compositions appear to be credible likenesses of their subjects, they actually have been digitally manipulated using Adobe Photoshop.

"Banker's Daughters," 2005, C-print.

Holcombe, who recently started as Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of New Hampshire, draws inspiration from works by Old Masters, such as Pieter Breugel the Elder’s morality tales and Francisco de Zurbaran’s otherworldly lighting.

“I look at classic paintings as a reference,” she says, but notes that her approach is fresh, distinct and modern. “The work begins by wanting to tell a story,” says Holcombe, who explores themes such as the ephemeral nature of youth, a narrative thread in her most recent exhibition “Homo Bulla (Man Is a Bubble).” The title work, a transcendent image of two boys amid Old World symbols of mortality, including a freshly snuffed candle and a broken hourglass, calls to mind 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings. “The Banker’s Daughters,” a languidly beautiful group portrait of three girls in a sensuously textured environment is reminiscent of John Singer Sargent, while “The Feast of the Newlyweds,” a cheeky and brilliant depiction of young love, is a clever allusion to Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”

METHOD OF WORK

---

“I never leave my house without my camera,” Holcombe says. “I’m continually photographing and archiving, and have a huge shoebox with stacks of CDs on spindles.” One current challenge is finding the right software for archiving and retrieving the tens of thousands of images she has amassed. Indeed, her method, like her work, also recalls the Old Masters, who created unified compositions from scores of drawing studies. In Holcombe’s case, photographs replace drawings, and she employs Photoshop to digitally manipulate the images.

A single finished work can involve dozens to hundreds of images, first rendered into a “sketch” and then refined into a single, coherent narrative. Holcombe finds portraiture challenging. “It’s not done in one sitting, but over the space of many hours,” she says. “Frequently I will go back to the computer after a shoot and realize there are other poses or gestures that would be more interesting.” In addition to her preparation, serendipity also plays a role. For example, once on a shoot in Ohio, she saw a young couple walking naked in a stream. “It was a beautiful moment, one that I couldn’t recreate.” The dreamy, pastoral vision became a central part of her “Three Ages of Man.”