I met Holly Heiser Hornyan when I asked her to paint a picture of Beth and her father, Phil just after he had passed to surprise her. Later, we asked her to do the 35′ x 6′ mural on the wall in our back patio in Pueblo Campestre. We talked about the feeling that we would like to have. She provided us with two sketches and said that it could evolve as the work was being done. Over the week, our vision and more appeared as Holly painted layer upon layer to get it just right. During that time, we learned a lot more about Holly, a Colorado artist who has been in Los Cabos for nine years and just moved to Pescadero.

Holly practices her skill and passion for painting in many ways. Examples of her murals can be found throughout Los Cabos. Her skill is in bring the outdoors inside by opening up closed rooms with her 3D paintings. At La Golondrina Restaurant in Cabo San Lucas, she turned a wall into an outdoor cafe. For us, she recreated the feeling we had on our deck on the water in Zacatitos. But her work goes way beyond murals, Holly has painted surfboards, skulls, portraits of people and pets, scenes of traditional Baja homes and streets, and lots of historical images of people like Frida.

Holly may be best known for her Brushes and Bubbly classes that she has offered at District, Latitude 22 The Roadhouse, Panache, and Shaka’s. For each class, she prepares a unique painting as the basis for the class. She brings all of the materials – canvases, paints, brushes – and leads the aspiring artists through every step of painting their version of the image. I attended one of the sessions at District as was amazed at how she taught the students – young and old, artists and neophytes – about light and shadows, and how their paintings had to reflect those things. At that class, two of the students had never painted before – a teenage girl and an older woman – and they left smiling, with paintings of which they could be very proud.

Holly has also created a number of images that can be printed as lithographs for framing or giclee paintings (oils on canvas). She has a printer in Scottsdale who can take the image and print it to almost any size and ship it to Los Cabos for framing. We chose several of these images for printing as oil on canvas for our condos in Todos Santos – adding lots of color to the industrial style units.

So, whether you are interested in learning to paint, or just having fun doing it at a great restaurant, or have a subject you would like painted as image or a mural, Holly is someone that you should consider. She is both talented and reasonable.