Ann Cohen and Tibor Szabo met while Ann was drawing a fellow coffee lover in Caffe Trieste. We are both artist and love to capture the moment, so we became friends. Tibor with camera and Ann with pen.
More About Tibor Szabo San Francisco and Ann Cohen
Our first exhibit was, Paradise Lounge series. You walked into Tibor’s art salon The Foreign Lens and colorful canvases hung from the ceiling like a gypsy’s tent. A Hungarian/70s San Francisco Gypsy tent. These 10-foot-long canvases advertised the bands who played in the Paradise Lounge, a famous night club south of Market in the eighties and nineties.
I loved drawing Tibor as he would photograph me for promotional purposes. That is how the collaboration of the camera and pen began.
Ann Cohen lives in North Beach and is always looking for her next draw of people living life including local bands, catching the moment with the pen.
Ann Cohen has been drawing music and people around in the bay area since the late 80’s. She has drawn thousands of local and well known bands in and around San Francisco. Ann takes a moment to hear the music or watch hand goes to the paper and draws the moment.
Ann Cohen has published 5 books of her drawings, I Do See You, I Do See You 2 and” I Do See You Three”., and two fairy tales. Ann and her late husband, Allen Cohen, a well-known poet and editor, founder of the San Francisco Oracle in the sixties have published two books, The Book of Hats and Like a Radiant White Dove. Regent Press is the publisher.
Ann’s art is in many private collections and has appeared in Beatitude magazine, Relix Magazine and Split Shift and various CD’s of musician’s that Ann Cohen has drawn.
These two creative artist were meant to meet by faith and the vibe of the North Beach art community. The relationship goes beyond the neighborhood however. Tibor growing up in the soviet occupied Hungary, Ann in San Francisco. The bridge between these two is longer than The Golden Gate of San Francisco or The Szecsenyi Bridge in Budapest. It is a testimony of people with very different backgrounds creating together.
Ann Cohen Draws the Performers at the Foreign Lens after a dinner at Sodinis Restaurant. Ballet dancers, musicians, acrobats, models are immortalized by Ann’s pen.
The pieces quickly find their way to collectors. The two artists are working on a documentary and are planning a joint exhibit.