PORTRAITS AT THE DE YOUNG "OPEN 2023" (Cheri)

We came to San Francisco because we still have a timeshare here, and to visit a multi-day quilt exhibit in Santa Clara.

I heard about the de Young Museum's "Open 2023" exhibition when one of the artists featured, Lorraine Woodruff-Long, spoke at the Monterey Peninsula Quilt Guild, shared on Zoom.  Since the Pacific International Quilt Festival started a day later than I expected when I made our reservations, we were able to see the exhibit.

This is the second time the de Young has published a call for work by artists in the nine Bay Area counties; this year 7,766 pieces of art were submitted for consideration and 883 were hung.

The pieces were hung "gallery" style in about eight huge, interconnected rooms.  We had to make sure to turn and look at the top pieces on the opposite wall each time we made a turn.

This approach made it difficult to get great pictures of everything, but most of what I took was better than what I expected.

Unfortunately, my photo at the top of this page misses the crisp detail and the intensity of the original piece.  (Actually, the face was in crisp detail; the artist, Cory Piehowicz, chose to blur detail as he moved into the jacket.)  You really have to visit Mr. Piehowicz' web site, a gold mine of artistry.

I have about eight posts to write, based on the Open exhibit and others that we saw today, but decided to focus on just the portraits today.

You will notice numbers below each piece of artwork.  Almost all of the work is for sale.  You can enter the numbers in at this page to learn more about the artists and their motivations, the prices, and find their contact information.

This piece above is another that my photography did not do justice to; it glowed!

The next three were just fascinating to me, due to their multi-media approach or digital manipulation:

Mark and I discussed how the image below had ultimately been prepared.  I think that the artist started with a digital image of lined paper, but we couldn't decide whether he had painted directly onto that, or had taken a digital image of his painting and printed it as well.

In any case, I love artistry that incorporates the written word - or even a reference to it - so this caught my attention.

As you can imagine, this next drawing did, too.  The artist said that the subject, his mother, loved Zane Grey books, so he drew this on top of pages of one of her favorites, which was falling apart by the time he inherited it from her: