To see the beguiling portraits and landscapes of island artist Olivia Pendergast, chances are you’d need to book a flight to Nairobi or Dubai. Those are the two cities where galleries show her internationally recognized work. And then there’s Vashon.

Lucky islanders need only make their way to The Hardware Store Restaurant on Friday, Sept. 2, to view Pendergast’s second show at the popular eatery. The exhibit will include a range of paintings in both size and price and run through September.

Pendergast, whose hauntingly beautiful portraits evoke the work of Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, knew from an early age that she, like her grandfather and uncle before her, was an artist. Despite an interest in many subjects, Pendergast said she struggled to stay in her left brain. She kept being pulled back into the arts, eventually graduating from Columbus College of Art and Design and working as a designer for the film industry in Los Angeles. But the fit never seemed quite right for the artist.

“Something always felt off when I was designing for someone else,” she said. “I loved it, but I was always called back to paint. I left for a winter in Utah, and everyone said, ‘You aren’t coming back.'”

Her friends were right. Pendergast stayed in Utah, where she hoped to launch her painting career. Her friends then said she’d have to be a waitress to support herself. They were wrong. Living close to the bone, with minimal needs, she decided to “just try” making a living by painting. In three months, she sold 17 paintings.

Yet, confidence in her artistic style didn’t come easily. Being schooled in an era of conceptual art, Pendergast felt out of step with her passion for figurative work.

“Portraits used to be considered sophomoric. I love now that portraits are cutting edge, but that’s not why I do them,” the artist explained. “I am plagued by portraits. I keep waiting for a big artistic shift, but I just keep painting people. I started in college, then this style with the line work came out during a residency at Vermont Studio Center.”

It was there, in 2001, that a fellow artist asked if she knew Modigliani’s paintings. She’d seen them in art history class, but she said the profundity of the images had never really sunk in.

Pouring over his portraits in books at the local library, Pendergast experienced an epiphany of sorts as she realized “he painted the way I feel.” The relief flowed out in tears — permission finally granted to follow her muse. In Modigliani, Pendergast found an artistic soulmate who painted something other than how people looked.

“He was painting how he felt when he saw them. He recognized something in humanity that I see as well — I am projecting that, of course,” she said with a laugh. “But that’s what it felt like, and that’s why I cried. I thought I was alone in that feeling. And he couldn’t stop painting (the people) over and over again either.”

While even favorable reviews cite her repetition with hints of criticism, Pendergast is unfazed. She doesn’t see that as a problem or even a censure, rather as something that her unconscious is clearly trying to work out.

“You just do what you do,” she said.

Doing what she does includes traveling the globe, most recently and frequently to Kenya, teaching art in the slums of Nairobi and befriending the women and children who live there. She often has to communicate with the people she wants to paint without the facility of language. But the challenge lands in her sweet spot — connecting through the heart, without words, in the nonconceptual territory where creativity flourishes.

“My heart feels like it will explode when I am in the women’s homes or teaching in the slums; everyone is mind-blowingly beautiful to me,” she said. “My heart is completely present and open, but it’s not love I’m projecting onto them. Love is present while the painting is happening; painting is a way to access that love, that emptiness, that I’ve felt since I was a kid. It’s the same feeling I get when I say the word kindness. It is gentle; there is a curiosity about it over and over again.”

Pendergast said she also feels great love for the island, which she and her husband, Peter Scott, CEO of Burn Manufacturing, and their 4-year-old daughter, Amadi, have called home for the last six years. Due to Scott’s work manufacturing clean cook stoves, the family will be moving to Nairobi in November, a heartbreaking decision for Pendergast, whose show is titled “Home.” Yet, despite both her worldly travels and longing to stay put, she now finds home — in the embodied sense — though her work.

“I’ve been desperately searching for home for so long, and I’m getting that it will look like what I thought it would,” she said. “When I paint, that is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling at home, and that might be the pull back over and over again.”