This week, an artist who lives and works in Napa opens his largest-ever museum show at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

Peter Scaturro, who paints in a rustic studio on an east Napa hillside, will display 50 works, including his dazzling abstract watercolors alongside equally vivid and energetic ceramic sculptures.

“The show is kind of a benchmark of getting it out of the studio, and out of my head, and out of my heart and into a space where people can see a good body of work,”  Scaturro said.

A Scaturro painting and one of his sculptures are also in the permanent collection at the Museo, which is the United States’ first Italian-American museum and cultural center.

As a young Italian-American art student in the late 1960s, Scaturro spent his junior year of college in Rome before earning first a bachelor’s, then a master’s degree in fine art from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania. He’s been a professional artist ever since.

“I’m surprised at myself that the passion has run as deep as it has,” he said. “And it just keeps getting richer, and I keep getting even more deeply committed.”

Scaturro settled in Napa less than two years ago after a decade working and teaching in Marin County and a sojourn in Florida, where he taught painting to Alzheimer’s patients in Boca Raton.

He currently teaches abstract painting and watercolors at the Napa Adult School. Scaturro has also taught some “very challenging” students at Napa State Hospital and collaborated on a piece with developmentally disabled Napa artist Katie Lockhart of the Brown Street Gallery.

“I’m very drawn to working with these folks,” he said of his disabled students and collaborators.

“They’re just special personalities, and I find that their abilities to express themselves visually are heightened because they can’t express themselves in ways that their disabilities prohibit.”

Describing his own personality as “interior and introspective,” Scaturro said he can relate to the “childlike side” of Alzheimer’s patients as they paint.

“It’s so direct, and it’s stunning that there’s not so much forethought and analyzing and conceptualizing,” he said.

It’s a lesson Scaturro has taken to heart in his own practice: “The beginnings of the paintings are explosive and very trusting and spontaneous,” he explained.

“People can think of spontaneity as being irresponsible, but it’s something that, if you practice it often enough, you get better at letting it happen — and letting it happen in its fullest, most dynamic way.”

In his recent work, particularly the “New Diamond” series of squared watercolor panels he began after moving to the eastern hills last year, Scaturro has consciously aimed at capturing that spontaneity. The new paintings continue to display a joyful sense of play and almost musical motion — but with fewer gestures, compared to his more complex, rectangular pieces.

“It’s kind of like going from a novel to a poem in a way,” he said. “Something that’s simple, as a poem is simple, can be pregnant with vision and power and depth.”

The energy that ripples through Scaturro’s two- and three-dimensional works on paper echoes in his ceramic sculptures, which he builds and fires in the studios of Napa Valley College.

“They’re all informing one another, and it seems that the sculpture and the painting are finding union; they’re not quite one yet,” he said.

As an abstract artist, Scaturro says he’s glad to be a part of Napa’s flourishing arts community. On his first day in town, he dropped by the offices of Arts Council Napa Valley to meet the staff.

“I think there’s a growing awareness in Napa to open up the arts — the visual arts in particular — past the point of where they have been; and perhaps they’ve been trapped in a more conservative and more conventional and more traditional, but equally valid way of creating art and images,” he said carefully.

“I think maybe some more of what’s modern, what’s contemporary — I think there’s a wanting of it up here and a thirst for it, and I hope I can just be a little part of the larger community here, doing that in my own little way.”

“Abstract in Motion: Paintings and sculpture by Peter Albert Scaturro” runs Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 4 p.m. through May 3 at the Museo ItaloAmericano, 204 Bay St. #C. (415) 673-2200, museoitaloamericano.org.

If you go

“Abstract in Motion: Paintings and sculpture by Peter Albert Scaturro”

Through May 3

Tuesdays through Sundays, 12-4 p.m.

Museo ItaloAmericano

204 Bay St. # C

(415) 673-2200

museoitaloamericano.org