Project Local: Maria De Angelo at the Caldwell-Lake George Library
March 1 @ 10:00 am - April 30 @ 5:00 pm
Maria DeAngelo
Mixed Media
Card Collages
Through April 30th
Artist’s Reception
Thursday, April 24th
6:00 – 8:00 PM
About the Artist:
Maria DeAngelo is an artist and educator who was born and raised in Schenectady, NY. After living 30 years in the Adirondack Mountains, she and her husband have relocated and established their studio in Altamont, New York.
Her explorations in art making are varied. Ms. DeAngelo studied Fine Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her concentrations were in Painting and Printmaking. She graduated with a BFA and went on to earn her MSEd from Potsdam College. Working with children has been a passion and inspiration for Ms. DeAngelo. Having taught hundreds of young artists over her career, Ms. DeAngelo shares their love of exploration and discovery.
In addition to teaching art in the classroom setting, Ms. DeAngelo has facilitated murals, art clubs, and community art enrichment programs. Ms. DeAngelo has worked in large scale installation, mural painting, studio painting, sculpture, printmaking, fabric arts and jewelry creation. She is a member of the Schenectady Art Society, Albany Artists Group, Firehouse Painters and ArtWorks. As a studio artist, she was an Artist in Residence at Arlene’s Artist Materials for two years, where she is now a One-on-One Mentor for artists. She continues her explorations of the intersections between personal history and plant forms using printmaking, painting and stitching.
Artist’s Statment:
Each of the paintings in this show contains scraps of my life. Some are precious, my parents’ love letters and my grandfather’s college notes, while others are more common, the bits of a mylar birthday balloon or a piece of paint stained paper towel I cleaned my tools with. The “canvas” of the works are playing cards, each collaged with life pieces held together with paint. Some I have stitched together, a skill learned from my mother, that I find myself returning to in cycles within my creative life. The stitches are a tool I used to combine the parts of these works and “draw” with line and color.
When creating this body of work, I gave myself the challenge to limit the color palette of the backgrounds to five colors that I used in varied amounts in every piece in the show. These colors are the bridge between the bits of life collage and the final layer of flora. I chose to create images of flowers because their lifespan is short and is impacted by the environment they bloom in. There is an external beauty in flowers, but also a beauty in the internal workings that we do not see, allowing them to grow, adapt and create food. I believe that our lives and our sense of self are stitched together from the interactions and environments we have experienced and the actions we choose going forward. We are a quilt of our past and present, the beautiful parts along with the torn and damaged. We can look for the beauty in the small moments and create change to improve our lives and that of others.
Project Local
at the
Caldwell-Lake George Library
336 Canada Street
Lake George, NY
518-668-2528
Hours:
Weekdays: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Saturdays: 10:00 AM – 2:00PM