A Bay Area artist, Gage Opdenbrouw was born and raised in San Jose, California, and currently lives and works in Oakland. He is a painter whose works bridge representation and abstraction. 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 John Natsoulas Gallery, (Davis CA), Abend Gallery, (Denver, CO), 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. When he’s not painting or veneering fine furniture or cabinetry at Berkeley Mills, he can most often be found playing music, most recently with Flat Black, and The Mindless Things, or hiking in the redwoods with his trusty Oakland Street Terrier, Hank. Artist StatementPainting is a means of communicating & deepening one's personal perceptions & reactions to the world, the small things that strike us as poignant, even if only for a fleeting instant.Painting is a means for closer observation of the world, and of one's self. Representational painting is a language for expressing or recording what's visible, but I feel it is of most interest when focused on something not entirely visible. In other words, I try to paint the exterior world in such a way as to evoke the mysterious richness & vastness of the interior world each of us carries within.My hope is that some of that feeling is passed on, or generated anew in the viewer.