Artist Roxane Hollosi has a plethora of artwork to her credit since moving to Atlanta, but being selected as a 2016 Free Range Artist thrilled her.
“I love the idea that Gainesville and this program are getting work out to the normal public,” Hollosi said. “I think it’s a really great idea, kind of enhancing that area.”
The Free Range Art Project, led by the Quinlan Visual Arts Center and Vision 2030 of the Greater Hall Chamber Commerce, will “promote art within the community through the creation of large-scale works of art installed in the public sphere throughout the city of Gainesville and Hall County,” according to a Quinlan news release.
Hollosi’s collage piece “Echoes VI” — a series of really small collages — was selected for the local project.
“They’re called ‘echoes’ because in that series I use bits and pieces of other work,” she said. “It’s a tiny little piece. So when it was chosen, I was really excited to see such a small intimate collage going to be transformed into kind of this mural size piece.”
Hollosi explained her piece was enlarged since it will be placed throughout the community for people to view from near and far.
“It actually held together being blown up 8 foot by 8 foot,” she said. “Some of the little marks and those little circles in the collage were just tiny and to see them blown up was fascinating to me. It was great.”
Hollosi said she’s inspired by “nature and sort of an internal need to explore feelings, ideas and rhythms that are sort of in and around you, but they don’t have visual forms.”
She said when she works, it’s similar to a conversation or journey she takes in front of her canvas. She explained she works with colors, textures and marks to create a visual rendering of the intangible.
“If you look at a piece, you might feel joy,” she said. “But there’s really no visual representation of joy or energy or rhythm or things like that. I try to explore and go deep into a feeling. It’s sort of a virtual world that I create onto my canvas.”
For this collage in particular, though, she had a message.
“I’m hoping that when they look at my work and that work particularly, that it almost can become landscape like and become peaks and valleys and maybe streams,” Hollosi said. “So they can just look at it, maybe get lost in a virtual world where they can just walk in and discover.”
Hollosi developed her craft by earning a bachelor’s degree in a fine arts from Iowa State University. She then lived in Boston for several years, working in an art department for an architectural firm.
Next, she was employed by a company called “Sticks” in Iowa.
“They make kind of fine art furniture and objects and I was on their painting team,” she said.
Since relocating to Atlanta, her main job has been “raising my children.”
But she has not stopped being an artist, spending time doing more volunteer work as well as exhibiting.
“On the side, I’ve just exhibited a lot in Atlanta and nationally in competitions, promoting my artwork that way,” she said.
And the woman is proud to be part of an new and emerging art project in Gainesville.
“I just thank the people (who) came up with the idea and (who) are spearheading it,” Hollosi said. “I think that projects like this in the public really bring awareness to the art and I think that it really brings people together. I’m just thrilled to be chosen as kind of one of the firsts ones to be included in this project and I’m looking forward to the future of it.”
