Hi, I’m Angela.

I firmly believe that art opens the door to healing and has the power to change the way we navigate our lives for the better.

My paintings honor the beautiful mess of life; they celebrate you as an individual and your relationship with others through creative expression and deep reflection. They exist to remind you that tending to our collective and individual struggles creates more room for beauty.

Each of my paintings starts with words, excerpts from books, notes I've made on small scraps of paper, and conversations. I use charcoal, oil sticks, and paint in pastry bags and bottles to write and create a foundation for each painting. After I've built layers of text, I respond to the image intuitively with sprawling strokes of color, line, and repeating forms, layering more writing as I paint. Sometimes conversations get lost, are illegible, or can overlap. I'll look at the words as composition and have a dialogue between the painting and myself, playing with what emerges.

I am an abstract expressionist painter and painting workshop facilitator inspired by the human experience and transforming grief into beauty. I work out of my studio in the RiNo Art District and live in Arvada, Colorado, with my husband, also an artist but of the blacksmithing persuasion, and our sweet dog. I create large-scale, colorful abstract paintings filled with bold, expressive marks and layered with text and story.

I studied abroad in Siena, Italy, with artist Franca Marina and the SUNY Buffalo program, hold a BFA in Painting from Colorado State University, and regularly show my work. With over 15 years in the human-centered design profession, I combine my love of learning about people with my art.

In 2016, following my experiences with grief through infertility and multiple pregnancy losses, I made the jump to work full-time as an artist and help change cultural taboos of expressing grief. Bringing my own experiences into the light through art helped me transform my suffering into beauty. Painting through these struggles freed me from the difficulty of navigating them alone. I'm passionate about sharing that possibility with others.

I particularly love the process of creating a custom painting. When I make a commissioned painting, I sit with my clients and learn about them and their unique stories. I often work with people who've also experienced a loss. After a series of one-on-one private conversations where I ask a few questions and mostly listen, I create a unique painting that expresses their story.

My highest goal is to encourage connection, resilience, and deep reflection of our lives. We all have a story to tell. We all experience joy, triumph, challenge, and pain, and no part is easy to express. But, all of it longs to be seen, heard, and honored.

I choose to paint abstract works because it allows another form of communication beyond language. The color, marks, and movement of the paint express emotions that can't be directly translated. Much like our human experiences, we feel them first.

When we express and record our stories, I sincerely believe that we create room for a fuller and more beautiful life. We can find gratitude, strength, and hope in even the darkest of times and know that we're never alone.

“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.

This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos”.

- JAMES BALDWIN

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Denver, Colorado