From Istria to West Oakland

Mr. Holdsworth originally arrived in Florence three months after the epic flood in 1966 and took a job restoring the ancient city by cleaning oil off the walls, columns and statues of churches. The job only took up 30 hours of his week, and so Mr. Holdsworth began spending his extra time painting scenes of the city. He says he immediately felt drawn to the country.

“In Italy, they consider it worthwhile to make life beautiful and enjoyable,” he says. “It’s not that life is automatically better there, but they make it better. They go out of their way to celebrate, design and cook in a way that has heart and soul.”

Mr. Holdsworth’s latest show, “Due Mesi in Italia e Istria” or “Two Months in Italy and Istria” is an attempt to capture the spirit and culture of Italy, and is also a reflection on his experiences there during the last 40 years. The show will open Saturday in Mr. Holdsworth’s gallery at 351 Lewis St. in West Oakland. It will be on display this weekend and next weekend and then will move to Caffe 817 at 817 Washington St., where it will hang from December 11 to January 10.

“I wanted to do something definitive because it has been 40 years since my first trip,” he says. “I wanted to convey my feelings about and my understanding of Italy.”

Although the 19 oil on canvas paintings in the exhibition could act as snapshots in a vacation diary, they also reveal Mr. Holdsworth’s connection to the places he portrays.

In “The Outdoor Market in Campo die Fiori,” he displays a picturesque market set on a stone street with rosy buildings in the background. As the viewer might expect, white tents shade the vendors and their colorful produce displayed on carts. However, the focus of the painting really lies in its bottom right corner where an old woman sits and stares directly of the canvas. She seems to be smiling at Mr. Holdsworth as he paints, which draws the viewer into the scene. As you picture her watching the painter, you become part of the scene.

“This woman was very worried about how she’d appear,” Mr. Holdsworth says. “These are tiny little figures, but I worked very hard to make her look good.”

Mr. Holdsworth describes experiences like these in a diary that will accompany each purchased painting. His entries tell stories about painting in each location and also describe the history of the places he portrays. In the outdoor market painting, for example, a monk was burned to death by members of the Inquisition in the same spot that Mr. Holdsworth stood in to paint.

Two other paintings, “Streets of Pearl #1” and “Streets of Pearl #2” show a limestone-filled alley in Rovigno, a city on the Istrian peninsula on the Adriatic Sea. In each, Mr. Holdsworth expertly depicts light falling on the glistening stones, but again, his story of the place brings the paintings their energy.

“The limestone streets are polished to mirror smoothness so they reflect the sky and the buildings,” he says. “It really looks like you’re walking on pearls.”

Clearly, Mr. Holdsworth loves Italy and the places he paints. He goes back every two years for one or two months, both to visit and to paint, and spends the rest of his time living and working in Oakland, where he focuses on “showing contrast between new and old” in city landscapes. He's owned the studio on Lewis Street, a short walk from the West Oakland BART stop, and the studio-complex of fellow artist Bruce Beasley, since 1990.

He says he insists on painting on location, whether in Florence or in Oakland, to capture each place’s essence.

“I try to get the real experience of a place into my work,” he says. “And it works. People who see it say they feel like they’re there.”

This feeling of presence is what Mr. Holdsworth hopes to bring to his viewers to expand their vision of the world.

"We can’t all go everywhere,” he says. “We base a lot of our understanding of the world on what the media feeds us, and a lot of that is artificial, stereotypical and untrue. In my work, I try to get some sense of the culture itself, and show that it’s earthy and traditional, and that this traditional sense is still there.”