#open studios

🗣️🎉 OPEN STUDIOS!! 🎉🗣️

I'm excited to announce that I'm teaming up with Suze Riley and Lauren Crasco for SF Open Studios this year!

This is my first year participating, and I'm going to dig out years of work that has never been exhibited. You'll also be able to flip through entire sketchbooks of figure drawings and explore my collection of Plein Air paintings!

Lisa Marie Patzer’s studio and detail from “Chromatic Landscapes”

Along with its exhibitions and programming, The Delaware Contemporary houses several artist studios. Several times a year the artists open their doors to the public. The images included in this post are from the December 2024 event.

The first images are from new media digital media artist Lisa Marie Patzer’s Chromatic Landscapes series.

From her website about the work-

Employing digital chroma-based processes, Patzer sorted, separated, and reconfigured images derived from more than one thousand 35mm slides. Originally captured by photographer Ben Kabakow during the mid-1950’s, the slides reflect his view of life in New York City and international travel. Lisa Marie Patzer’s treatment of this large archive emphasizes the role nostalgia and personal association play when interpreting another’s visual anthology. The result is a colorful set of vignettes and landscapes that are abstracted from the original context inviting the viewer in for playful association.

Below are selections from some of the other artists studios and from the walls surrounding them and their bios and quotes from the museum’s website.

Still life paintings by Jenna Lucente

Jenna Lucente is an artist and educator currently living in Delaware. She recently completed a public art commission that includes 28 glass windows for the above-ground Arthur Kill train station in Staten Island, New York. Commissioning agency: MTA Art and Design; glass fabrication by Franz Mayer of Munich.

Work by Ruth Ansel

Ruth Ansel creates paintings using egg tempera. “My egg tempera paintings are meditations in pigment and brushstroke.”

Sculptures by Jennifer Borders

Jennifer Borders is a visual artist whose sculpture and drawing is installation-based and often participatory. She uses history, personal family stories, and current events to prompt viewers into inquiry.

Painting by Caroline Chen

Caroline Chen paints primarily with oil on canvas. “Painting is personal. The slow act of seeing takes time and hands and grace. I’m striving to express simple truths before me, to paint the emotion as well as the subject itself.”

Work and woodblocks by Caroline Coolidge Brown

Caroline Coolidge Brown is a mixed-media printmaker and visual journaler who collects inspiration from her travels far and near. Her playful work combines traditional printmaking processes (etching, monotype, lino and wood block) with collage and paint. “Mixed media printmaking allows me to push expected boundaries of “what is a print?” or “what is a painting?” For me, it’s all about the layers – of color, shape and meaning.”

Paintings by John Breakey

John Breakey– “The familiar space above the horizon line provides conditions that empower my vision. The powerful brevity of Minimalism and the lasting voices of the Abstract Expressionists motivate me to treat the pure instance of looking out not as an act of passive observance but as a call to action.”

Paintings by Lauren E. Peters

Lauren E. Peters– Through self-portraits based on staged photographs, Peters explores the multifaceted nature of identity.

Work by Diane Hulse

Diane Hulse is an abstract, mixed media artist whose work includes painting, drawing, and objects. With a background in science and the fine arts, she explores internal and external landscapes, as found in the psychological terrain of self and the beauty of our embattled Earth. Intensely curious about almost everything, she studies nature, architecture, poetry, spiritualism, and psychology. Just as curiosity is a pillar of her art, so is imagination. A pink ocean or a monster perched on a beach ball are not farfetched for her. In fact, Hulse often pretends that she can miniaturize herself and walk through her paintings. She agrees with Picasso, who said that it is essential for artists to keep alive the child inside of all of us.

Whew!

I can’t believe it. After all this time, I’ve finally gotten all my ducks in a row and opened up my handmade art shop, located at my home. It’s surreal. And fabulous. And so much fun! I’m beyond thrilled with how today went with all the visitors who came to check out my art while on their tour of the Bolton and Harvard Open Studios.

Since buying this house about 6 months ago, my family has had a vision of turning the front enclosed porch into a little art shop with all of my handmade pieces on display. Our goal was to set everything up when we first moved in to get it up and running as quickly as possible, but with my mom’s health and being her care givers, we had to put that idea on hold so we could focus on her and her well being.

Sadly, now that she’s gone, we now have a little more time to devote to putting into our shop idea. So here we are, diving headlong into this little venture. It’s nothing fancy, nothing over the top. Just an adorable little room filled with sunlight and jazz tunes and colorful mixed media art!

Today was an absolute blessing! I never thought I’d have as many visitors as I did. The Bolton Harvard Open Studios event has been in the planning for several months now, and being that this was my first year, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In the past, I’ve always done fairly large craft shows and events, with hours upon hours of tent setup and merchandising all of my art with a secret fear of each event having some sort of rain or crummy weather that would ruin my art. Talk about stressful. But now, I’ve got such a cute little setup and I don’t have to tear down, worry about rain or being unsure if the money that I put into the cost of the show was going to be made back. Now, my art is just up there on the walls of the shop for all who visit to look at and enjoy (which I hope they did!)

So thank you to all of the wonderful folks who came out today to support my art and visit the first day of my shop being open. It was an exciting day for all of us (my kids as well because they’ve been working hard helping us set up too!)

As the year slides to its conclusion, the season of autumn is a special one for artists, especially for this reporter who began a journalistic venture more than 25 years ago, covering the Open Studios event in San Francisco’s Sunset District. 

Among my first articles about artists in the neighborhood at that time for The Sunset Beacon Newspaper, back in the fall of 1993 was surrealist Cynthia Tom. 

Her work was then and still is in my mind a touchstone. Back then, I was entering my 30s and her work, as I now realize, opened a door to me. My article about the Open Studios via ArtSpan was my third article or so, for the Sunset Beacon which serendipitously brought me to it. 

Yes, there were other artists I covered, like the eclectic and at times whimsical Murai. But, even in spontaneously playful art pieces, Cynthia, even back then always express a purpose. 

Over years I have had the privilege to witness her work grow and become more profound with each step of her own inner-journey. Cynthia has continuously illustrated how important it is for art to help the community in which it is expressed. 

Whether she was uncovering her immediate family’s past in her art or trying to unlock the secrets of a culture’s ideas and social mores, Cynthia has remained true to herself. 

As a philosophy major in college, as I struggled with academia, I clung to the saying of Blaise Pascal. “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart."

And from that saying, I recognized that the subconscious made conscious is what a surrealist is all about. But unlike Salvador Dali and others, Cynthia’s surrealist art only wants to illuminate the human and restore its sanity, not pull it a part and leave it on the floor. 

At least, that is how I understand her work, especially now. Cynthia emphasizes healing, restoration and empowerment. Whereas, Dali mostly shocked people. 

That’s not to say that some of Cynthia’s work is not thought-provoking, it is! But  for me, her work has always emphasized the key elements in humanity, which is the soul or spirit. That aspect is what brought her into doing retreat-workshops and conferences, like “A Place of Her Own,” utilizing art and art skills, that promote healing. 

It intrigues me that Open Studios occurs in the autumn when celebrations like Halloween and Day of the Dead are in full swing. “The lifting of the veil” or the time of the year when the divide between the physical tangible world thins and gets close to the etherial or “other side” is what autumn brings. The entire season hints as it were that there is something much more to life than what we encounter day to day on the surface level. 

To me, it seems that Cynthia’s surrealist art and sensibilities, while universal and for all seasons, coincide very much with the autumn. She has participated in Day of The Dead celebrations and art installations over the years, either as one who has presented an art installation or helped other artists in their works. 

Busy as she is Cynthia is not resting on any laurels as she says. “I have so much more work to pour out of my soul.”

In addition to her annual Open Studios this coming Nov. 10th and 11th, she has been be participating in the 2018 SOMArts Dia de Los Muertos Group Exhibition, a multicultural community celebration of inclusion and strength, which will conclude on Nov. 9. 

Cynthia's piece entitled: Hungry Ghosts: Our Ancestral Patterns is partly based upon the research and study she conducted delving into the complex history of Angel Island - often referred to as ‘The Ellis Island of the West Coast.’ And, it has been on display since Oct. 6. 

“To Heal, Grow Strength and Power Cynthia says, you must explore your ancestral patterns. What happened to twist your family's coping mechanisms? What historical event reshaped your family forever? You can change the trajectory, she says. Wake Up!”