A Bay Area artist, Gage Opdenbrouw was born and raised in San Jose, California, and has lived in San Francisco for 12 years. He is a painter who works on the edge between representation and abstraction. He aims to distill his images to a point where there is a powerful emotional resonance, while maintaining a deep sense of mystery.

He paints primarily in oil, and the vast majority of his works involve the figure or the landscape in one way or another. Opdenbrouw’s paintings comprise several distinct, yet interrelated bodies of work.

His body of landscape painti...

A Bay Area artist, Gage Opdenbrouw was born and raised in San Jose, California, and has lived in San Francisco for 12 years. He is a painter who works on the edge between representation and abstraction. He aims to distill his images to a point where there is a powerful emotional resonance, while maintaining a deep sense of mystery.

He paints primarily in oil, and the vast majority of his works involve the figure or the landscape in one way or another. Opdenbrouw’s paintings comprise several distinct, yet interrelated bodies of work.

His body of landscape paintings, often painted from memory or the imagination, explores color and the vastness of space, and our resulting sense of insignificance and unity, as ways to evoke an emotional and spiritual response.

His figurative paintings are often portraits and paintings of dear friends and family.

One recent body of work is a series of paintings, mostly of close friends, from photos taken during the Dia de los Muertos parade, and is a meditation on the themes of love and loss, life and death, and friends and family.

The “Strangers” series began as a grid of blurred portraits of unrecognizable figures, and has grown into an exploration of identity and the human spirit, often incorporating landscape imagery as well.

In addition to his studio work, he also teaches painting & drawing in a private capacity. In 2001, upon his graduation with a BFA, he received an award as “Best Emerging Artist, Painting”, from the Academy of Art College, at the time the largest school of art & design in the nation. Opdenbrouw was an Artist-In Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in December of 2005.

He has shown his works at a number of galleries around the Bay Area and the country, including the Charles Campbell Gallery, ArtZone 461 Gallery, the SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery, the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, Bryant Street Gallery, Donna Seager Gallery, and at MPG Contemporary in Boston, as well as juried shows nationwide. A number of his “Dia de los Muertos” paintings will be shown in the Fall of 2009 at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, as a part of a show of Dia de los Muertos related art. His paintings have been widely collected, and exhibited across the country. You can see more of his work at www.engageingart.com .