Angie Wright is a northern girl. She was born and raised in South Yorkshire to parents who always supported her in all her endeavours, which included art and music.
Angie toured Europe in a youth orchestra at 18, playing the double bass and piano, and often thought that music would be her path in life. She studied at Leeds University and met her partner, Matthew. With his career in the holiday industry, they have travelled and lived all over Europe. Eventually, they settled in Portugal and couldn’t bring themselves to leave!
Angie knew she was always going to be an artist of one sort or another. “Music or dancing or even cooking and the creation of new recipes… anything where I could push outside the box and do things my way. I like to challenge myself and in paint, I found the perfect companion. Oh, how paint moves! Gloriously glossy and thick like syrup… I can push and shape paint, sculpt it into textured layers. Paint is my accomplice! I dream of colours and landscapes, then sit plotting with my paints on how to bring my visions to life.”
She is constantly inspired by nature and mainly paints large expressionist-style landscapes and botanical works which aim to represent a neglected and wild beauty through the use of vivid colours and energetic mark-making techniques.
“When I walk with my dogs, I see everything I want to paint, twisted branches and wildflowers, endless skies swirled with colour. Urban patches of ground where a tiny buttercup flourishes. I want to represent the forgotten beauty of the world, neglected beauty which suggests human emotion and life. This also corresponds to my love of portraits and the challenge of representing emotion within them.”
Angie tries not to limit herself to one genre and prefers to work on very large canvases. “I love taking a large expanse of white canvas and filling it with vibrant colour and shape. Many of my artworks are up to two metres in width and fill a room with the outdoors and nature. I focus on the beauty of the world. I’m a glass-half-full kind of girl and I don’t like to dwell on the darker side of life. My paintings should fill people with joy. I want to create a window for people to see the beauty around them.”
Her art studio is full of different painting mediums, and each one brings a different element to her work. Angie mainly paints with oils and acrylics, but she has also created beautiful portraits using paper collage and built a large, life-size sculpture of a horse out of driftwood! She has shelves full of household enamel paint, which she throws onto canvases and even uses crayons and pastels to emphasise detail in her artworks. Angie works with a bold colour palette, utilising strong cerulean blues and primary yellow, intense magenta, and pink. “I find these colours create an energy in my art which reflects the constant change and chaos of nature.”
She starts with a large canvas placed on the floor and initially lays paint on the canvas in a free, expressionistic manner. This builds up layers of colour and develops depth in her paintings. The thought process behind her work is almost as fascinating as the art itself: “This freedom of movement and selection of colour is almost meditative and allows me to discover what I want the painting to become.
I am sure these seeds of ideas then reflect in the initial layer of paint I place on the canvas. From this point, I examine what I have and start building the paint in layers with ideas assaulting me and blossoming as the painting progresses.”
She moves the canvas to an easel to work in finer detail towards the end of the painting to exaggerate focal points and bring clarity and cohesion to the final artwork. Her art is a dynamic process and her artwork constantly evolves. “The finished piece is never quite what I expected to paint, and this element of surprise is intoxicating and holds my excitement as I work.”
Angie usually works on an artwork for a week, and at that point, it will be almost finished. Then comes the tricky bit! She hangs the new artwork on the wall in her living room and spends the next few weeks living with it in her peripheral vision whilst it dries. It is only after living with it for some time that she actually knows if the artwork is finished. She has been known to take paintings a year old and alter them!
It’s no surprise that the colours used by Vincent Van Gogh in his later paintings inspire her. “Through the strength of those colours, his paintings jar my memories and take me back to childhood summer days. Another artist I love is Leroy Neiman, who also worked with strong abstract colours in relation to his subject, bringing a dynamic energy to his paintings.”
Angie has a refreshing honesty and vibrance to her work, as she explains: “I’m not trying to change the world; I just want people to see the beauty of it. My art should make people feel at peace and happy. There is so much turbulence in life and people often forget to appreciate the beauty all around them. Imagine… a tiny buttercup forcing its way up through a crack in the pavement. I want to be as strong and defiant as that buttercup! We all face so many challenges in our lives. To know that a flower can flourish even in the harshest conditions and bring beauty to the world inspires me, and I hope others will see this, too.”
Angie had two artworks shown in NoLita, in New York last month and hopes to exhibit at the Swiss Art Expo again later this year.
You can view and purchase her art on her website www.angiewrightart.com and also through www.singulart.com and www.saatchiart.com
She is available for commissions and can be contacted at angiewrightart@gmail.com
