The 37th annual Silicon Valley Open Studios continues this weekend, focusing on the Midpeninsula region. In the second of a two-part series, we chat with longtime Palo Alto painter Gregory Deane and Portola Valley-based mixed-media artist Libby Raab.
Gregory Deane — Palo Alto
Open Studios often offers an opportunity for visitors to get their first glimpse at an artist’s workspace. But this year’s event offers a last chance to visit the studio of longtime Peninsula abstract expressionist painter Gregory Deane.
After a career of over 50 years, Deane is retiring and closing the Palo Alto art studio where he has worked for the last 25 years.
Though he’s closing his studio, Deane’s work can be seen in a number of spaces, not only in the Bay Area, but throughout the country and internationally, as well. His works can be found in a diverse range of places, from corporate campuses and hotels to private collections.
“I’ve done a lot of work with local corporations. It’s a long list that I’ve worked with locally: Nordstrom and Sobrato, Syntex and Hewlett-Packard, Symantec — it goes on and on. I’ve got quite a list of that and movie stars, galleries across the United States, some congressmen, some banks out of the country. After 50 years, it’s a lot of work that I’ve done,” Deane said.
On the international front, Deane made a particular splash in Italy. In 2002, he was invited by the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno to have a show in their museum in Florence. The organization is an academy of artists founded in the 16th century. Deane also has a painting in the permanent collection of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, home to works such as Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”
“It came about through a friend of Ron Martino of Martino Interiors in Los Gatos. He had a client who saw my artwork and she was from Italy and she had connections with the Accademia,” Deane said of the show.
“So she presented my name, and I became the first American to have the privilege of having a show there. It was a request show to me, so it was quite an honor. Then they also gave me a show while I was in Italy, at the American Consulate. It was in Florence. It was quite a time for me to be there.
“That moment at the Accademia in Florence, Italy, would probably be a highlight of my career. That was a major show for me. It took two years to get it together,” Deane said.
Deane’s international attention seems especially fitting as he said that traveling does influence his pieces.
“I did a lot of paintings with an Asian influence when I came back from China. I ended up doing about 40 different paintings. It turned out to be a series of paintings. I did that for quite some time and they’re all gone — none of them stayed very long,” he said.
But as an abstract expressionist painter, he’s not aiming to re-create a particular scene or view, he noted.
“It’s hard for me to express what the paintings are. It’s more of a reaction of people when they look at them. And hopefully they’ll like what they see because it’s not meant to be something specific,” Deane said.
Though Deane is closing his studio, he doesn’t expect to stop painting, but he said he may take a break for a while. He also doesn’t plan to sell the studio, but aims to lease the space, which is located on Transport Street in Palo Alto, near the Mountain View border.
As he plans to vacate the space by next month, he has cleaned out the studio of everything but paintings — Deane estimated there might be about 100 or so pieces that visitors can view.
“It’s so much after 50 years of doing this and this has been my job — my career. There hasn’t been anything else that I’ve done. And I’ve felt very fortunate to have clients and to be able to do art that I want to do over the years and make a living in Palo Alto.”
Gregory Deane shows May 11-12 at 4075 Transport St., Palo Alto, gregorydeane.com.
Libby Raab – Portola Valley
Within Libby Raab‘s detailed woven paper collages are more elements than may appear at first glance. The pieces incorporate many diverse things: photographs of nature, color theory — even Microsoft Excel has a role to play.
Raab, who is also an architect, transforms photos into intricate woven pieces that play with color and pattern.
Raab began weaving with paper mid-pandemic, though she had previously knitted and quilted — all the type of work with one’s hands she describes as “restorative.” She was studying Josef Albers, who’s well known for his color studies, and was drawn to weaving after becoming intrigued by the works of Albers’ wife, Annie, who was a famous weaver.
“Since I don’t really have a loom, or room for a loom, I thought, ‘well, it could be interesting to just cut up strips of paper’ and I started by cutting up strips of magazine images and putting them together. Of course there are so many different weave patterns that you can use and so many different image choices you can use. I just found it to be highly satisfying. I was hooked,” she said.
It wasn’t long before Raab began to use her own photos as the basis for her pieces, digitally altering them to achieve particular colors or textures before cutting them into strips for weaving.
“I have tons of photos — of course, nature is a big inspiration to so many artists. But for some reason, in the beginning, I was really focused on photos of tree trunks,” she said. “In my phone, you just can’t imagine how many tree trunk photos I have,” she said.
Though images of nature are at the foundation of her pieces, Raab also likes introducing a more technological element as well.
“I have been interested in contrasting a nature photo with something that feels very digital. So I started abstracting things and taking successive screenshots of them and then blowing them up and taking another screenshot — it becomes its own digital fabric. So then I could always contrast the little digital pattern fabric that I made with the more natural pattern of a tree trunk or a mushroom or something else. And I liked how putting those together just seemed interesting to me.”
The images, and their colors in particular, become the basis for her pattern
“Once I decide on the images that I’d like to use, I’ll make a pattern and actually do that in Excel,” she said.
But it’s not the mathematical abilities of the program that are as important as its expanse of blank cells that can be filled in to make the pattern. Raab noted that weaving patterns are binary: it’s either over or under, and she uses Excel to denote where in the pattern there is an “over” or an “under.”
“I’ll try to make a weaving pattern that mimics maybe slime mold or moss growing on a tree trunk, but in crazy colors, you know, a little more abstracted. So I’ll make a pattern from the Excel spreadsheet and print that out. And then I just start slicing my paper and weaving it together based on whatever pattern I’ve made,” she said.
Lately, Raab said she’s become interested in removing parts of her completed woven pieces. She jokes that she’s not working out any “personal angst” in her work by taking some of it apart, but just that she’s experimenting and interested to see various effects.
“If you think about weaving as integration of two different things. I was like, ‘Oh, I can integrate and I can disintegrate. I can look at the passage of time. Sometimes if you go to a museum, you’ll see a fragment of a textile that’s old and because it started to decay, it fell apart. And I always feel like those are the most interesting ones. They have a story to tell. So in a way, I’m making the weave and then I’m giving it its own story of how it might have pulled apart or had moss grow on it over time,” said Raab, who is the mother of Almanac reporter Eleanor Raab.
This will be Raab’s first year showing at Silicon Valley Open Studios.
“I’ve always gone to open studios and really enjoyed getting to see an artist in their studio space and get to understand more about the context of their work just by seeing them in their own home and their studio,” she said.
Libby Raab shows May 11 at 410 La Mesa Drive, Portola Valley, libbyraabart.com.
Silicon Valley Open Studios takes place 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. at all sites over the weekends of May 4-5, May 11-12 and May 18-19. Admission is free. For more information and a map of participating artists, visit svos.org.
