Collage artist, Belinda Lima in front of her painting, Abanico, one many dynamic works on exhibit at the Granite Rock Design Center in Cupertino where she is the featured artist through to December 6.

Scenes from the reception on Saturday, including Nancy Wulffe (center), who Belinda had taken drawing and watercolor classes from. There were lots of artists attending the reception!

I know Belinda through the Los Gatos Museums Gallery where we’re both member artists, I love her work, full of print and pattern and texture, her subjects are instantly recognizable, stylized, cropped images, women with an umbrella, a fan, a bag, a dog, or a guitar and her abstracted Golden Gate Bridge, each work has a restrained palette with a hit of color. I was so happy to make the reception on Saturday and I asked her if there was a symbolism behind these very specific objects that appear throughout her work? She gave me a true collage artist’s response – “I like the shapes”.  Love it!  The collage artist is so physically and intimately aware of shape as they hold each piece of paper in their hands while tearing it just so or carving it out with an exacto blade or snipping aware with scissors.  It is all about the shapes.  Belinda did say too that she likes her subjects to have some interaction and these objects that have an implied movement work well. I think that her real subjects though are these iconic objects and the figures serve as accessories for them.

Unexpected Reunion, in my personal collection, packs a lot into it’s six square inches! I love how Belinda has used a lot of different textures and patterns but because of her subdued colors, the effect is not at all overwhelming. The delicate tissue she uses makes the light umbrella transparent, which seems to echo the barely discernible features on the woman’s face and hands. Her vague expression helps to create intrigue and there is a a nice physical and metaphorical tension between transparency and opacity.

Belinda’s Bridges are all about shapes too, here the squares of negative space in the bridge help to set up a grid for laying out pieces of the San Francisco skyline. Left to right they are Bridge # 5, The Bridge and Bridge #6.

Belinda Lima’s work can be also be viewed on her website at belindalima.com or at the Los Gatos Museums Gallery.