I was able to see Angela's show on Tuesday. At Equinox. A good place for her to be showing. She's a better artist than where she's been showing over the years. (The pictures included here were taken prior to the hanging of the paintings.)
Angela was a star in the mid-1980s. A star among us. Of the walk-to-the-head-of-the-line-up-and-get-in-the-door variety. The VAG's 1985 Young Romantics show featured the Futura Bold group that formed at ECUAD (when it was an art school), combined with four slightly older not unrelated artists (in their thirties). It was a show that had to happen. And because it could, it did.
The paintings at Equinox are all oil paintings, with no photographic interfaces (hence the exhibition title "With Themselves"?), which has been Angela's style since it was rumoured she once found or was gifted a steamer trunk full of photographs and made paintings with them. Her former teacher Ian Wallace has for years combined photography and paint, but he takes his cues from Mondrian. Angela's mode is decidedly expressive, preferring to paint her figures, likely because she can, and because she derives some pleasure from it.
So yes, oil paintings on mylar. Some in earthier and metallic colours, others in day-glo pinks and blues; some as high as 8', others as low as 3'. All the figures are women, some in whispy late-Victorian/Classical positions, others reflective of Munch, perhaps in a nod to fellow Vancouverite Stephen Shearer, who, if he were five years older, could or would have been a Young Romantic too.
