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| Anthony Holdsworth with his painting Climate Change Quartet #3 (Fire Over Water) Oil on canvas 42 x 55 inches $20,000, 2011 |
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| Anthony Holdsworth : Photos by Justin Beck |
You may have seen plein air painter, Anthony Holdsworth, with his easle set up on location in San Francisco or Oakland. His goal is to visually translate a space and it's surroundings to the viewer. Not an easy task when you think about it. The light shifts, the traffic flows, passersby are inquisitive. All part of the experience of the space. Yet to focus in on how to interperet what you are seeing and feeling is quite a unique challenge. Anthony once described it like this:
"If you think about painting the sky...The sky is blue, but you don't just paint the sky blue. It has light and depth which our eyes can see, the challenge is caputuring that with paint."
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| Anthony Holdsworth Bay Bridge Panorama, 2008 Oil on canvas 30" x 120" inches $20,000 |
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Anthony Holdsworth Beneath the Bay Bridge # 5, 2000 Oil/C 40x30 $5,000 |
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Anthony Holdsworth A Break in the Clouds, 2004 Oil on canvas 36 x 34 inches $3,500 |
Anthony says this about his process:
“ I generally work on location in the city. The urban landscape is an accurate and disquieting testament to our common condition. I encounter it first-hand in the hope of conveying its original intensity. Though sometimes devoid of people these ‘cityscapes’ emerge from my interaction with passersby and inhabitants at each site.
Color theory and Perceptionism (a term coined by color theorist Faber Birren) provide a foundation for my work. I weave qualities of light throughout a painting to create interacting harmonies that compel attention and convey a mood. I seek an approach in which the abstract dynamics of color and paint application play an essential role in conveying the essence of place. My interest in place has drawn me to paint traditional regions of Europe and Latin America where the close connection to the natural environment sheds light on the surrealistic disassociation of American streets.”
Many of Anthony's paintings show his concerns about the way we impact our environment and the effects of global warming. Recently one of his projects moved Anthony off the city streets and into a San Francisco garden, where over a period of five and a half months he documented the life cycle of a single sunflower in a project called Season of the Sunflower : The Continuous Oil Painting.
(Video is best veiwed in full screen.)
This video is composed of 450 images of a painting that was repainted daily on location over a 5 and one half month period to reflect the life-cycle of a sunflower in a San Francisco garden. To Holdsworth's knowledge, this is the first time a 'continuous oil painting' of this nature has ever been created.
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