Holly Bird

Holly is an award-winning printmaker, artist and graphic designer. Beginning her design career while completing her Bachelor of Design in Graphic Design degree (a BFA+) from the University of Florida, she embarked on a wide-ranging career as a designer and illustrator. From storyboarding Caddyshack at age 18 (and later working on four other movie features and a television series), she graduated and moved on to working as a magazine art director; freelance advertising & editorial illustrator; digital 4-color printing service bureau director, 3D animator and finally as the senior broadcast designer at Tampa television affiliate WTVT FOX13 for several years.

She left television and corporate life in 1999 to teach graphic design and drawing; first at IADT Tampa and later in the University of South Florida’s inaugural graphic design program at the St. Petersburg, FL Bayboro campus. She is now concentrating on block-printing in linoleum and woodcut and copper-plate etching in her private home studio, Studio Ibis, while continuing to freelance.

This began fortuitously in the mid-2000s while teaching illustration and pen & ink drawing at the Dunedin Fine Art Center (DFAC) in Dunedin, FL. She met DFAC printmaking instructor Stephen Littlefield there for the first time, who introduced her to new methods of copper-plate etching — more benign and less toxic than those encountered in college. And encountered the process of mezzotints, and multiple block & reduction linoleum prints. Becoming an exhibiting, full-time fine artist in traditional printmaking, in a way, was a means to get off the computer whenever possible. It was a pleasure to get her hands inky again, creating non-digital, archival works of art in multiples using centuries-old methods. Within the Arts & Craftsman Guild and other similar organizations, she is taking part in the Arts & Crafts Movement Renaissance: a revival of artisans working in that early 20th c. style. “Head, Heart and Hand” is one of the mottos of the Roycrofters and the original Arts & Crafts Movement: a push-back against the Industrial Revolution then, but still entirely relevant today in the digital age.

Holly is currently on the faculty of DFAC, teaching relief printing and copper plate etching and is a consultant with the forthcoming Museum Of The American Arts & Crafts Movement in St. Petersburg, FL.

An avid, lifelong sailor and former Sea Scout leader & keelboat racer, Holly’s block print work reflects her love for traditional small craft sailing and Florida's coastal waterways. They also reflect her background in problem-solving as a designer, while her drawings, etchings and mezzotints are more personal and differ in tone. They reflect her deep love of line drawing and are more mythic and Faery Tale in nature.

She lives with her husband, mother and a very lazy lab in Palm Harbor, FL.

More work may be seen here: www.studioibis.com.