As a child on Hawkins Lane, Joseph Holston loved disappearing into the surrounding woods. The once-rural road lined with small houses built by a former slave had become, by mid-century, a pocket of black families in posh Chevy Chase. The future artist spent endless hours watching trees blowing in the wind. “I was studying the beauty that people didn’t see,” he recalls. “I saw the movement and a lot of rhythm in the movement. I saw faces, people’s expressions. And people dancing; they were enjoying themselves. That’s most likely what I was looking at—that positive aspect of life.”

Holston, now 80, has interpreted those impressions over more than a half-century creating fine art. His career spans early realism to Cubist-inspired abstraction, electrified in many cases by brilliant blocks of color and exuberant curves, as he revisits those early, affirmative life forces. Over the years, the artist’s paintings and etchings have become part of many collections, including those of the Library of Congress, Federal Reserve, Baltimore Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Phillips Collection.

Interested since childhood in becoming an artist and displaying skill as an illustrator by age 10, Holston felt lucky to grow up in the Washington area. “I didn’t go to school and have someone introduce art to me. I discovered it on my own,” he says. As a teenager, the future artist headed to the National Gallery of Art and “beat a path right to Rembrandt’s galleries” to study the master’s work. After a year of high school, he and his family moved to Northeast Washington. When a stranger he chanced to meet there mentioned that on graduating from Chamberlain Vocational High School’s art program he’d be paid to create advertising art, Holston immediately enrolled.

Later, with seven years as a commercial illustrator under his belt, Holston determined to move on. “I think what I wanted to do was grow,” he observes. During that time, he had taken art classes in the DC area as well as in Santa Fe; he’d also had success selling his realistic oil paintings on Washington’s Mall and in retail malls. Following a trip to Tanzania, where he was a guest speaker at the University of Dar es Salaam, Holston’s work shifted toward greater freedom and abstraction. He was influenced above all by the flat, fragmented planes of Cubism. “I love the Cubist age,” notes the artist, adding that the style encouraged him “to be more basic in my thought process. You can say so much with a few lines.”

By 1987, construction was finished on his three-story studio in Takoma Park, where he still paints in a skylit, double-height space. On the first level, an etching press attests to the artist’s many decades producing sepia-toned and color etchings, a tribute to Rembrandt’s works-on-paper. Holston also taught himself screen printing. “Each medium took me in a direction that I had to break down to understand what was going on,” he explains. “The beauty is in learning it.”

Of all the techniques the artist has mastered, “my favorite is oil painting,” he says, “because it was quite a challenge to explore and understand.” Several of his new paintings and earlier works portraying the joys of jazz performance were shown recently at American University Museum. Like a jazz musician, Holston proceeds in improvisational stages, painting on a few canvases at once. He notes, “I like to stay in a frame of creativity, to get into the rhythm and go from there.”

His choice of colors and color combinations depends “on what I want to say, the kind of emotions I want to bring out in the work,” he explains. “At times my theme may entail a shout to wake up somebody.” Those blasts of color often become backdrops for the syncopated, flat-black oval heads that dissolve distinct facial features of his figures. About those simplified ovals, a viewer once told him, “I just love their expression.”

His reply: “That person took it far beyond what I gave them. It’s my challenge to have the viewer complete the thought process by giving them a few road maps along the way.”

Holston’s signature compositions always preserve recognition of their subjects. As co-curator of a retrospective of the artist’s prints at University of Maryland’s Driskell Center in 2011, Elisabeth Hodermarsky wrote in the catalog, “When one sees a Holston, one knows it’s a Holston.”

The artist beams, “I love it when someone says that because when people see the work, they see the form I’ve created—even though the form has existed for a long time. I didn’t invent it.”

In his preteen years, Holston remembers shining shoes at barber shops in Bethesda. Later, he and his wife, Sharon Smith Holston, opened their own gallery in the Air Rights Building, now Bethesda Crossing. Early on, the artist reflects, “I knew I had to create something to communicate to people about from which I came, being African American and using my way of creating art. And I’ve had a lot of fun doing it!”

Holston’s art is on view at Amy Kaslow Gallery in Bethesda through February 16th; amykaslowgallery.com. For more information, visit holstonart.com.