artist profile: pablo calderon

Born in El Salvador in 1952, Pablo Calderon came to San Francisco with most of his family when he was in his late thirties.

In 2002, he started creating art at Creativity Explored—a nonprofit visual arts center where artists with developmental disabilities create, exhibit and sell art.

What we love about Calderon’s work is that he paints on a very large scale, uses saturated hues, broad strokes, and his subjects are usually single or repeating faces or animals.

Calderon alters his color palette and the surfaces he paints on—canvas, wood, paper, glass—but the wide eyed, curly-haired subjects consistently look very much alike; he refers to them as ‘munecas’, Spanish for dolls.

His artwork is well collected and though Calderon speaks only limited Spanish, he is happy and enthusiastic to show and explain his work to potential patrons.

To spend one minute with Pablo Calderon in the Creativity Explored studio, go here.

artist profile: eric boysaw

San Francisco’s Creativity Explored is a nonprofit visual arts center where artists with developmental disabilities create, exhibit—and sell art as ongoing support of their activities.

Artist Eric Boysaw is a native of San Francisco and his language, American Sign Language, has influenced many of the artworks he has produced over the years. He primarily works with drawing media, using pastel, charcoal, and ink with great precision.

Originally rendered in those mediums, Eric’s robot is given a new life in a flatweave dhurrie. His signature is woven in the corner as a gentle reminder of the creative talent behind it while a percentage of the sale of each rug will go directly to Creativity Explored.

artist profile: hector lopez

Hector Lopez was born in 1968—in San Francisco—where he still lives and where he’s been a member of the Creativity Explored Studio since 2006.

His gregarious personality is reflected in large landscapes and portraits that are just as colorful and dynamic. Preferring to paint on pieces of wood, his palette ranges from fiery reds and yellows to violets. 

His ‘highly populated’ artworks—such as a recent series of autobuses with buses so large they fill the picture plane and contain multitudes of people behind the windows—also reflect his love of the crowded, bustling art studios of Creativity Explored. The place where he’s surrounded by ‘amigos’.

To spend one minute with Hector Lopez in the Creativity Explored studio, go here.

artist profile: marcus mcclure

In partnership with San Francisco’s Creativity Explored—a nonprofit visual arts center where artists with develop­mental disabilities create, exhibit and sell art—Marcus McClure’s two-dimensional artwork is reinterpreted as a hand-tufted wool rug.

Marcus was born in 1984 and has been a studio artist at Creativity Explored since 2006. Motivated by the physical process within the process of creating his works, he starts with geometric drawings and builds layer upon layer of thick acrylics.

For his abstract works, he usually prefers earthy, muted palettes from burnt oranges to olive greens—which work incredibly well on the watermarks rug over a sea of vibrant blue and turquoise.

To spend one minute with Marcus McClure in the Creativity Explored studio, go here.

artist profile: valerie jenkins

wood birds pillowValerie Jenkins is a native San Franciscan who joined the Creativity Explored studios in 2001.

When she talks, it’s as if she’s speaking in the form of a poem. So it’s not surprising that the lines in her beautiful visuals seem to be drawn from her innate lyrical quality.

Valerie works predominately with watercolors, ink and colored pencil on paper and her subject matter is varied—usually inspired by photographs—and sometimes letters, words, or numbers are incorporated in the final piece.

To spend one minute with Valerie Jenkins in the Creativity Explored studio, go here.