7x7 is a proud and longtime supporter of ArtSpan and San Francisco Open Studios, the five-week annual event during which hundreds of local artists open the doors to show their latest work directly to art lovers and new potential clients.

In celebration of this year's festival (October 14th through November 12th), we stopped by the offices and studios of five artists with, gasp, day jobs! In this series, we'll highlight artists with double lives, including a barista artist, a surrealist who sells insurance, and a motorcycle mechanic who more than dabbles in mixed media art.

Meet, Dilcia Giron, mixed media artist, who fuses her art with her day job. Moving to San Francisco from El Salvador, she transitioned from being an established artist to taking a full time job. With less time to devote to painting and photography, she admits she began to suffer from depression; and so she began to bring her sketchbook to her office, and then her magazine clippings, and then paints. On her breaks she found not only solace, but a focus that she didn't have before for both her art and her job.

  

Name:Dilcia Giron

Occupation: Account Executive at MOC Insurance Services

Medium: Giron is a mixed media artist spanning a variety of mediums including photography, collage, paintings, digital illustrations and printmaking. Rather than stick to single medium at a time, she goes back and forth based on what she is inspired by in the moment. Accordingly, she manages multiple Instagram accounts in tandem (@cosmiccorners for photography; @collartge for collage; @dilciagironart for paintings and sketches). Much of Giron's work exists in contrasts. For collage work, she goes through an organic process of piecing elements together to provide a flash into the subconscious mind. In her photographs, she focuses on fractal patterns of the structured environment and its coexistence with the chaotic forces of nature. She'll find geometric and irregular patterns from the sunlight and translate them to canvas in color and shadows.

She says: I bring my sketchbook to work everyday. I leave it open on my desk and when I have a moment I draw. Since I started, I've become more productive at work, my performance has improved, I became happier and fulfilled. I started to appreciate everything around me, because I began to look at my environment as a source of daily inspiration. I am more aware now and more interested in my present moment. I like how my regular job and my art are related and there is duality between what I do in front of my computer and what I create on my sketchbook. I was also able to create a whole art project called Freedom of the process that included 12 pieces I drew in the office. After work, when I go home, I still have the energy to paint, to create some collages, and to use some photos that I took during the day. For instance, my series Order & Chaos, comes from all the photos that I took of buildings and architectural structures in downtown San Francisco, on the way to work.

Meet her: October 28th-29th, Big Daddy's Antiques, 1550 17th Street (Dogpatch), dilciagiron.com