A Bay Area artist, Gage Opdenbrouw was born and raised in San Jose, California, and has lived in San Francisco for 14 years. He is a painter whose works bridge 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 and allowing the viewer’s experience to be an important part of completing the image.

He paints primarily in oil, and the vast majority of his works involve the figure or the landscape in one way or another. While Opdenbrouw’s paintings span many outward subjects, the true recurrent subject of his work is the richness and radiant beauty hidden away just behind the surface of the observed world, as well as the vastness our interior worlds, and the resonance between the two.

Opdenbrouw’s paintings have been widely collected, and exhibited across the country. He has shown his works at a many galleries in San Francisco, and around the Bay Area, including the Charles Campbell Gallery, ArtZone 461 Gallery, the SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery, the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, Bryant Street Gallery, and Donna Seager Gallery. He has also shown at Gescheidle in Chicago, and at MPG Contemporary in Boston, as well as in many juried shows nationwide. In 2009, in addition to two solo shows, his works were included in exhibtions at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, and at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, as a part of a show of Dia de los Muertos related art. Opdenbrouw was an Artist-In Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in December of 2005. In 2001, upon his graduation with a BFA (with honors), 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. In addition to his studio work, Opdenbrouw also teaches painting & drawing in a private capacity at his studio, and in a variety of local settings, working with both children and adults. You can see more of his work at www.engageingart.com.