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Harry Holl: An artist to the end

By C. Ryan Barber, Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass. on

Published in Senior Living Features

DENNIS -- When Tina Holl visited her father on his birthday last month, he asked her to take a painting down from his wall so he could work on another.

The abstract rendering of a vase and flower on a table never came down. A week later, on Thursday, the famed potter and sculptor Harry Holl died at Epoch Senior Health Care, the Brewster senior home where he had been living since December 2008.

He was 92, an artist until the very end.

"It was wonderful he was still thinking like that," Tina Holl said.

With his once steady hand shaken by Parkinson's disease, Harry Holl took his creative talents to painting later in life. For a time, Holl taught art classes in a sunny corner room at Epoch Senior Health Care, until his Parkinson's disease came to severely limit his ability to speak, his daughter said.

But it was Holl's pottery, and his devotion to art and education on Cape Cod, that made him a renowned figure.

In 1952, Holl moved to Cape Cod from a commune in Portland, Ore., and opened his first pottery shop on Route 6A. Not wanting to become part of the "gallery scene," he eventually moved Scargo Pottery to a secluded spot overlooking Scargo Lake, where visitors can still find his ceramic castles, busts and pots, among other items. His first pot sits on a shelf in a nearby barn that once served as his painting studio.

"He wanted complete freedom to make whatever he wanted," Tina Holl said Sunday, at the studio where she continues the family's craft.

At the sight of oxides, which give glazes their color, Tina Holl recounted how her father would never hold onto glaze formulas. A natural teacher, "he shared it with everyone," she said, always wanting to welcome and encourage fellow artists. He went on to found the Society of Cape Cod Craftsmen, among other groups for local artists, and co-founded the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History.

In the early 1980s, Holl and his friend Roy Freed co-founded the Cape Cod Museum of Art in hopes of showcasing and preserving local artists' work. Today, a ceramic mask made by Holl greets visitors of the museum, which has set up a small exhibition in his memory. The museum is working with Holl's family to prepare a "major exhibition" of his work that is expected to open later this year, said museum Director Edith Tonelli.

"You feel his presence. He's kind of a living presence in the museum because of his energy and this dream he had of preserving Cape Cod art. Even before you get into the museum, there's a beautiful ceramic piece of his -- a female ceramic head," said Tonelli, who has never met Holl but has become familiar with his work in the five months she has led the museum.

"I really felt I needed to carry on the dream that he had, because he really started it out of nothing. It's pretty amazing to think of what he created out of a dream," she added in an interview Sunday. "Unfortunately, his friend Roy Freed also died this year, earlier in the summer. We've lost our two founders in a matter of months."

With Holl's death, Jim Goodale lost a friend. After moving in across the hall from him nearly three years ago, Goodale, 72, began talking with Holl about Parkinson's disease.

Goodale, who also suffers from Parkinson's, said Holl would be honest, drawing from his own experience to say that the disease could grow worse.

 

"He was telling me what was probably going to happen," Goodale said.

But Holl also noted that everyone's experience is different.

Goodale, whose daughter had worked with Holl in the past to plan art shows, was familiar with his work and "jumped right in" on the weekly art classes at Epoch, "even though I am the least artsy (person) you could possibly be," he said.

But Holl encouraged him and included a painting of his in the senior home's art show.

"I was pretty proud of that," Goodale said.

"He was always giving me advice and said I didn't need to be a professional artist, just go with the flow."

The last time the two spoke, Holl's disease had devolved to a point where he could hardly speak. The two sat together, appreciating each other's company.

"All we did was shake hands," Goodale said. "He said, 'Thanks for coming, Jimmy.' And that was about it."

Follow C. Ryan Barber on Twitter: @cryanbarber.

(c)2014 the Cape Cod Times (Hyannis, Mass.)

Visit the Cape Cod Times (Hyannis, Mass.) at www.capecodonline.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services


(c) Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass.

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