Artist is bitten by desire to put greenheads on canvas
They need blood. Your blood. That's how the mighty greenheads produce eggs. And the flies don't politely nibble or, like mosquitoes, stick you quickly. They tear chunks of your skin. Then they lap up the blood.
This is the menace Sam Holdsworth lives with for three-and-a-half weeks each summer. Out here, on the salt marshes of west Gloucester, greenheads rule.
"They have tormented me for 30 years," said Holdsworth, "and through that torment I've learned to respect them."
He's channeled his respect for the Tabanus americanus Forester into a series of paintings now on display at the Cape Ann Museum. It is the first solo museum exhibit for Holdsworth, a late-blooming artist best known for founding Musician magazine and running Billboard before semi-retiring in 2006.
Through the 38 oils on panel, some as small as 5 by 7 inches, Holdsworth has created work that manages both to reference Renaissance-era painting and Woodman's, the famous North Shore roadside seafood stop. He charts the life cycle of the bugs, inserting them into human environments and placing their green alien-like heads on human bodies. To create this saga, which includes extensive wall text Holdsworth has written, the artist blends real science, personal experience, and imagination.
"They're exquisite little paintings, but it's also the concept and mythology behind it," said Ronda Faloon, the museum's director.
On a recent afternoon, Holdsworth, 56, who splits his time between Gloucester and Santa Fe, stood in the tiny, 15-by-15 foot gallery explaining why he dedicated so much time to the blood-sucking intruder. Holdsworth's blond hair is graying in spots. He and his wife, Betsy, a nurse-midwife, have three children, their ages ranging from 19 to 26. In person, Holdsworth retains the same boyish charm he thinks made others underestimate him in the business world.
He said that once he began painting the flies in the mid-'90s, he felt driven to create a unified body of work. To make his point, Holdsworth drew a comparison from his previous life in the music industry.
"In the heyday of music, artists made albums," he said. "You didn't just do a good song. You had to create 10 or 12. I apply the same to art. If you've got an idea and you want to pursue it, flesh it out. Go the distance."
He wears leather sandals and talks with relief about largely stepping out of the business world. Since leaving Billboard, he helped raise money for a series of companies and broker deals for several others. He served as CEO and chairman of Rykodisc records from 2000 to 2006 before it was sold. At this point, his only real responsibility is to Solvi Brands, a company whose main product is the energy drink Crunk!!! Holdsworth serves as chairman of its board of directors.
That leaves him with plenty of time for his art, which he creates in a private studio at his Gloucester home.
"Painting is something you can't do very well if you do it part time," he said. "So for the last six years, I've been painting almost every day."
Holdsworth didn't always paint. He was an entrepreneur in the purest sense. A college dropout, Holdsworth borrowed $20,000 with a friend and, in 1976, started Musician magazine in a barn in Colorado. The publication became famous for its lengthy and insightful features on rock stars. After selling it, Holdsworth took over BPI Communications, running Billboard and dozens of other publications between 1985 and 1991. The sale of Musician allowed him to buy his house in Gloucester in 1981; the sale of BPI made him millions. It also allowed him to start painting.
"I hate to say I'm a creative person, please don't say that, but when you have the urge to make something, sometimes you just have to make it," he explained. "When you're running a business and managing people who make something, you're not making something. Making Musician magazine was a creative act. Making 35 business magazines [at BPI] is not. It's a management act."
Gordon Baird, his Musician co-founder, said he wasn't surprised that Holdsworth took up painting.
"He's a Gemini, so he has a business side that's three piece suit and then he had a back-alley side, which wants to go off and commune with nature," said Baird, who also lives in Gloucester. "He was very successful navigating the business side, and yet there was that side that just wanted to be a painter."
The fly paintings started in 1996 with "The Red King," a simple side view of a robed greenhead on a tiny panel. Holdsworth kept at it, eventually crafting a series that tracks the flies from birth to death. The centerpiece, hung directly across from the gallery door opening, is a 5-foot-long landscape that shows a seemingly endless line of flies on the marsh, with a small group working the barbecue. This is "high noon," he said, when they have taken over.
From there, Holdsworth shows the greenheads in various states of activity. They form small prayer groups, ride jets skis, and stand in line at Woodman's, the famous roadside fish stop in Essex.
"Your good time is their good time," is how Holdsworth describes it.
He also imagines them retreating to elaborate, underground chambers. This is how he explains where the greenheads go when the clouds come out.
"They're very humorous but what he does is take a phenomenon that's really a part of his life and incorporates it with a touch of surrealism," said artist Alexander Shundi, Holdsworth's lone painting teacher. "He refers back to the transitional period between Gothic and Renaissance. People like Giotto. He takes early Renaissance classical art and uses that as a tool he almost mixes with a surreal modernity and comes up with this personal alphabet. They're theatrical, actually, little windows of theater into a modern world."
Holdsworth never planned on showing the work at the museum, where he has served as trustee since 1990. Over lunch a few years ago, he showed a few of the pictures to the museum's then director, Judith McCullough, and her companion, Harold Bell, the local philanthropist who served as president of the museum's board of directors for 24 years.
They loved them, and suggested a show. Holdsworth, who said he doesn't sell his paintings but sometimes gives them away to friends, resisted until he felt he had enough work to warrant an exhibit.
He said he has no plans to become a professional.
"I don't need to make money off my painting," he said. "That's a great luxury. Since I was a little kid, I've always been in love with art and music. I was in the music business. That'll kill that for you. Fortunately, I've never been in the art business."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com 