Meet Allura Fong, September’s featured artist
As part of our ongoing 40th anniversary celebrations, we are featuring a different CE artist and logo every month of 2023! Read more about our 40th anniversary and our featured artists ▸
If you visit Creativity Explored’s second studio in Potrero Hill, it’s more than likely that one of our longest-practicing artists, Allura Fong, will greet you with a tour. You’ll follow behind her wheelchair as she deliberately shows you every corner of the space, and introduces you to everyone there, until you can’t help but feel at home.
Born in San Francisco in 1974, Allura has been working at CE since 1995. Her colorful, expressive works have been capturing hearts and minds for decades. Allura occasionally explores assemblage: she draws and paints on paper, then cuts out parts of those pieces and collages them together into gestural, abstract works. She also likes to work with ink, watercolor, pastels, markers, and sometimes even clay. In the past, she has also enjoyed painting and drawing on top of photocopies. When asked what she wants people to know about CE, Allura responded “That I’m a good artist!”
The layering in her artwork produces a floating effect, which works in tandem with her subject matter (often hearts, flowers, butterflies, and other organic shapes) to lend a dreamy quality to her work. Her playful use of marks and loose brush strokes also make her compositions feel airy, as if they might drift off the page.
Allura draws from her imagination to create her pieces, without reference materials. She likes to create alone as well as in a group; she collaborates with teaching artists, and is always interested in their thoughts on her work.
“Like many of the artists in CE’s studios, spontaneity is central to Allura’s work. She finds no value in spending hours (or even minutes) preplanning and sketching numerous iterations of her compositions. Allura works in the present at all times, and her motto could be Carpe Momentum! (seize the moment). She alternates media frequently as layers of mark making yield intricate filigreed forms. Later, these lacey drawings are occasionally enveloped in a translucent fog of water colors or diluted acrylics, resulting in compositions that sometimes resemble what one would see peering through a microscope, or gazing up at clouds while various flocks of birds flutter by.
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Untitled by Allura Fong, 2022, mixed media on paper, 12 x 9 inches
Allura also has a rich practice of incorporating her collage aesthetic into animations, accompanied with a voiceover by the artist herself. Her animation Hearts & Flowers (2015), which you can watch below, exemplifies this approach.
Allura is a core member of the Creativity Explored community, quick to strike up a conversation and compliment her fellow artists. She enjoys company in the studio and loves meeting new people, and with her friendly and chatty demeanor, visitors are drawn to her. She is very loyal to her family and friends, which include teaching artists and care companions as well as fellow artists. Her sense of humor means you can often find her joking or playing around with her peers.
And her favorite part of Creativity Explored? “Meeting new friends.”
A selection of photos of Allura Fong from the 90’s, plus a current one of her working on a textile piece.
