SOMA Open Studios at South Beach

I stopped by South Beach Artist Studios on Sunday, the last day of SOMA Open Studios in SF. I'll write more about Sandra Yagi in the next post, but two of my other favorites were Susan Rippberger and Florence Gray. (That's Florence's work above - a couple of huge paintings in the hall outside her studio.)

Susan Rippberger's studio was a hodge-podge of disparate projects and she was sitting at a table in the middle of it all with food wrappers scattered on the floor by her feet. Turns out, she was weaving a prototype "shawl" out of the plastic wrappers. Half the wrappers were from Mexico, half the wrappers were from the US. She explains it here:



Florence Gray is a painter and I was immediately drawn to her use of color and her expressive, brushy application of the paint. Her newest work is a large set of mostly small pieces, all with single iconic images and single words. She's been using an vintage set of simple kid's flash cards as inspiration. Regardless of subject, her paint handling is really beautiful. Here she is in her own words:



Also: Nancy Ewart wrote about some of the SOMA open studios at the Examiner.