Alan Holt

Lives: Halifax, Yorkshire

Colleges Attended:
Bradford College of Art Art Foundation
Newcastle Polytechnic BA(hons) Fine Art
St Martins School of Art, London Advanced Sculpture
Leicester Polytechnic School of Education PGCE(Art Education)

Extract from Following Wallace's Passion(script)
After seven years of teaching Art and Sculpture, I left to start a woodcarving business. This was in the late 1980s and in the middle of the Victorian Revival in Interior Design. There was plenty of demand for good quality products and I started to make carved mantelpieces in oak and mahogany. For my design ideas I took photographs of carved stone decoration on town centre buildings in Halifax and Huddersfield and developed ideas for mantelpieces in Victorian and Edwardian style.

I was, in fact, re-living the Arts and Crafts ideal which harks back to styles and times gone by and to the making of objects in a traditional manner. I had to learn the skills necessary to do the job and to obtain new carving tools as my chisels weren’t the type which were suitable to carve detailed designs in oak and mahogany and I bought myself a copy-carver which is a mechanical pantograph, to ‘rough-out’ the carvings and to help me work quicker. Similar machines were actually used in Victorian times.

I had moved in the opposite direction; now from modernist art to using craft based traditional style to make functional objects which Wallace was also training to do. I then immersed myself in decorative woodcarving for eighteen years before returning to abstract sculpture but now with a carved ‘craft’ emphasis.

We have forgotten what it was like before modernism but to some people the term ‘Modern Art’ still generates antagonism, without them realising what the world was like previously. Fry would have pointed out that, in modernism, there was emotion expressed in the way paint was applied or wood carved etc. There was experimentation and the elimination of sentiment, decoration and representation. It is hard to know what the real effect was on people like Wallace but his life and art did seem to change at about this time. Now, we are used to the idea of experimentation in art and it would be difficult to turn back the clock.

My life overlapped that of Wallace by two years and I wish that I could have met him although conversations may have been difficult. The experience of seeing his work and learning about his life has certainly had a positive effect on my work and decision making.