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the Japanese artist, Shakaru.  Holty was absorbed with the older artists use of ascending and decending movements which put the entire work in movement, while retaining a comparatively flat suraface.  In his adaptation of this revolving space, Holty was very particular in the placement of his shapes.  [[Strikethrough]] [[??]] [[/Strikethrough]], since he found that this spacial concept called for a complete reorientation of proportion and of related forms.  For example, Holty found when large shapes were placed near the bottom of his paintings and smaller ones above them, no matter how abstract the composition, the space would tilt forwards and backwards, creating something approximateing depth perspective.  Holty, therefore, tried to keep his shapes in rather equal proportion, or else saw that they were well integrated in the over-all composition.

Holty was also concerned with the approximation of light in color.  This conception must be differentiated from that of light as illumination, or as a color matching of light and atmosphere in the natural world.  Holty greatly admired the drawings of Rembrandt, but he felt that Rembrandt's paintings had been severely damaged by the endless coats of varnish subsequent generations had applied in seeking a quality of nebulous lighting,as if a searchlight was turned on the sitters faces, when he saw some color reproductions of works of Rembrandt that had been cleaned, Holty was happy to see the Dutch masters own color as bland and [[??]] far more beautiful than the theatrical illuminations which had been fraudulently imposed.

I feel Holty worked toward a pulsating color, rather equal all over in chromatic value, whose energies emanated a light within itself.  Sometimes Holdy would pass his hand across his paintings observing the cast shadow to see if it fell evenly all over the canvases.  In an [[answer?]] to a question I poised, I find this comment of Holty in another letter of 1952: