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Old Oakland Market - Courtesy Alta Galleria
The colorful and vibrant paintings of gifted local artist Anthony Holdsworth are certainly well-known and recognizable by everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area. His accurate and detailed cityscape paintings of favorite streets, neighborhoods, and buildings in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco have practically reinvented the genre for these West Coast cities. He has almost singlehandedly reinvigorated public interest in the regional and the local characteristics of place; and he has captured and redefined the mood, atmosphere, and beauty of many historic landmarks that we now look at again with fresh eyes and a new understanding. He has imparted new meaning to the familiar.
His most recent paintings have also taken on a political slant and purpose, wherein his works reflect current domestic and global events, like the devastating consequences of global warming , The Global Warming Tritypch (2008),and the imminent demise of newspapers caused by the Internet, Storm Clouds over the Chronicle (2009).
The retrospective selection of Holdsworth’s city and landscape paintings currently on view at Alta Galleria in Berkeley provide an excellent opportunity to see the progress and changes he has made in his craft over the past thirty years. The works in this exhibition of small-scale paintings date from 1979 (Boiling Pot and John’s Garden) and 1980 (Berkeley Bowl Series: Meat Counter) to 2009 (Old Oakland Farmers Market #4 and #5, and Storm Clouds over the Chronicle). Besides familiar local subjects like the Port of Oakland Series and the Oakland Farmers Market Series, subjects in these paintings range from scenic picturesque landscapes in Amsterdam, Mexico and Italy to urban vignettes laden with social significance, like Trucker’s Friend, an early painting of a roadside truck stop, and Day Workers on Cesar Chavez, two works that present local economies of scale without comment, but whose historical significance is obvious.
What makes all these works so memorable and rewarding, of course, is Holdsworth’s consummate skill as a master painter and craftsman. His comprehension and mastery of color and composition, and ability to depict differences between natural and painterly light, all combine to create unique representations of his subjects that his selection of view and perspective always enhances. These are simply beautiful painterly works that reveal and transmit Holdsworth’s joy in painting, his love of color, and the pleasure of pigment. His earlier works are more impressionistic, with vaguer outlines and blurred brushstrokes. Later he begins to use defined forms with distinct outlines. Line becomes more important while at the same time his palette explodes with color and radiant luminescence.
Alta Galleria
2980 College Avenue, Suite 4
Berkeley, CA
July 18 – August 20, 2009
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