My California Adventures : A Pleasant Saturday in San Jose (California)

On a sunny Saturday in San Jose, I happened to run into a great art gallery located on The Alameda.

The lobby looked strikingly similar to the entrance of a beauty shop and the lady looked up and asked if I wanted to see the exhibit. "Yes," I said. She replied she would go in and turn on the lights.

The gallery was situated below a beauty salon. The lady was connected with the salon which explained why she had little to say about it beyond asking me if I wanted to see it. It was early yet, and I had the whole place to myself.

The gallery did not appear to have a name. The artist was a Vietnamese man named Trieu Hai Dao, and I had the most enjoyable time looking at his artistic creations.

A binder sat on a table in one room of the gallery showing me a glimpse of other artwork by the artist, photographs of exhibits he had held in the past.

San Jose has great art, at least I like what I've seen. I've seen wonderful southwestern ceramic patterns on the side of a bridge on Santa Clara Street, and wonderful sculptures on 5th Street across from the Civic Center. I've visited the San Jose Museum of Art when the early photography of Ansel Adams was featured, and I've been delighted by the displays of handmade books I found once on the 5th floor of the downtown Martin Luther King Library. Yes, I think that San Jose can be called a good city for the arts.

What I like about Trieu Hai Dao's art is the calmness I feel when I look at it. His art--at least the paintings and sculptures I liked the best--were large, solid, and colorful. Some of his work seemed "cosmic"--featuring outlines or shapes of humanoid figures, and creatures, and bright balls that could be planets or suns. I tend also to be attracted to art of an "organic" nature"--paintings and sculpture with lots of soft curves and gentle grays and browns, which his was.

Walking around the gallery on The Alameda was a visual smorgasbord. The natural lighting, the synergetic arrangement of the pieces, the maturity and quality of the art work made for an outstanding experience. Unplanned and unexpected, it made for a pleasant Saturday in San Jose.

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