[1] He studied with the California Impressionist portrait and landscape painter Theodore Lukits (1897–1992) in the 1970s and began working professionally in the early 1980s.
[2] Solliday is described as a painter with a "muscular, masculine style" and has been compared to artists of the Taos Ten, especially E. Martin Hennings.
[7] Through his plein-air work in the pastel medium and large canvasses, he has played an important role in the revival of landscape painting in Southern California.
[citation needed] Solliday was born in the small town of Ottumwa, Iowa, but grew up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in southern California.
While he was interested in becoming a fine artist, working in outdoor advertising proved to be good experience for an aspiring painter and it enabled him to pay for his art studies.
He began by "drawing from the antique" which meant doing charcoal or graphite portraits of marbles and plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek statuary.
Solliday, Adams and Karl painted en plein-air with pastels, as their teacher Lukits had done in the 1920s and 1930s.