Clare Rojas Art Opening

There is a stunning Clare Rojas show up right now at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art here in San Francisco. The show is called Clare Rojas, We They, We They and is up from now until August 22nd.

Clare is one of the bright stars of the San Francisco art world and one of my most favorite artists. What is so special about seeing Clare’s art in person is that you get to see up close her impeccable craftsmanship—from almost miniature paintings done with fine brushes, to intricately cut and constructed 12-foot (or higher?) wooden wall panels. Clare told me that setting up her shows is exactly like quilting, and I can really see that.

The colors she uses struck me as well, it was like every color was carefully considered and unique: pale faces with almost neon orange lips, cherry red flowers against creamy backgrounds. There are no straight from the bottle colors with Clare, that’s for sure.

If you were lucky enough to catch the show on opening night, there was the opportunity to see Clare sing and play guitar as her musician persona, Peggy Honeywell. Her music is lovely as well. Oh, to be so lucky and be so multi-talented!

As for the themes in Clare’s art, I think you could say she’s drawn to strong women, a sense of ritual, beauty and symmetry in nature, and love and respect for animals. Good themes in my book.

So far, we have published two projects with Clare: the cloth-bound Floriography Journal, and a set of notecards called From My Garden. It was fun to see them for sale in the museum’s gift shop along with her two children’s books, Pidgy and Blue Deer and Red Fox, and her previous monograph, Hope Springs Eternal. I am very pleased to report that we will also be releasing a garden themed monograph next spring.

Amelia Anderson
Senior Designer

Read the original post on Chronicle Books Blog

This entry was posted by one of one hundred trained flying monkeys employed to retrieve items from The Net with brass and steam powered prosthetic limbs on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 1:05 pm and is filed here to tease your curious mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response below, or trackback from your own site.