Married artists paint changing city
Holdsworth and Landau race time to catch present-day San Francisco
On one corner of 24th and Treat is a 19th century low-rise apartment building with bay windows and dilapidated wood siding. On the catty-corner is streetscape artist Anthony Holdsworth working at his easel. It takes him about two weeks to make an oil painting, and it is always a race to see if he can get it done before the old building is sold to developers and torn down.
“I’m trying to catch it before it changes too much,” says Holdsworth, who has painted city life around the world before homing in on the Mission District four years ago.
Holdsworth’s wife, Beryl Landau, is also a cityscape painter. He works in oil; she works in acrylic. Her canvases are square and his rectangular. Now both will exhibit their San Francisco paintings in a joint show for the first time in their 38-year partnership.
“It never has occurred to anyone to invite us to show together,” says Holdsworth, who paints on the sidewalk, in between conversations. Landau cannot stand the interruptions so she works in their home studio, using photographs for reference.
“We have two very different views of the world,” he says.
When “The Changing Cityscape” opens Saturday, April 28, at San Francisco’s Luna Rienne Gallery on 22nd Street, there will be 20 or 30 paintings, divided evenly to prevent any marital discord.
Landau, 74, is a realist who describes her style as “symbolic landscape.” Holdsworth, 73, describes his as “Perceptionism.”
“Beryl is more interested in mood,” he says. “I’m more interested in distilling the experience of a place over several days or weeks into one painting.”
He likes to incorporate the changing light and the changing people, though he resisted the urge to incorporate the two men who were fighting in the middle of the intersection on East- er Sunday.
“That didn’t seem to fit in with the painting I am making,” he says while working on his piece titled “Spring in the Mission.” “I’m interested in the Latin character of the Mission.”
Born in England, Holdsworth had lived in 13 homes by age 13, “which has something to do with my interest in place,” he says.
Holdsworth and Landau attended San Francisco Art Institute, though at separate times. They met when neither was invited to exhibit in a citywide celebration of the Art Institute. So they had their own renegade exhibition at SOMArts.
Later they led a group of artists to Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power, and have painted all over Mexico and Latin America, and in England, France and Italy.
They live near Precita Park, and when Holdsworth first decided to stick close to home, it was mostly for convenience. He could haul his gear on a wagon hitched to his bicycle.
“Then I got caught up in the whole idea of gentrification,” he says. “You know San Francisco — neighborhoods rule, or they try to.”
Everything is in flux in the Mission, including the name of the exhibition at Luna Rienne. It started out being called “San Francisco in Transition,” then became “The Changing Cityscape.”
“I’m interested in the juxtaposition of old against new,” says Landau. “How an image makes you feel and the mood it sets.”