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‘Playing with colors’: GSO artist Angie the Rose breathes vivid life onto her canvases

You’ve probably seen her work before.

Broad, colorful brushstrokes that branch out from a central point and create a sprouting form of rapturous color. Bright pinks and teal greens interact and weave in and out from one another in tear-shaped droplets that form clouds or tornadoes or, on rare occasions, the artist herself.

Greensboro artist Angela Barker, known by her artist name as Angie the Rose, has been creating art since she was a child in the mountainous landscape of western North Carolina.

“Ever since I was a little girl, those were the most vivid memories I have from my childhood,” Barker says. “I was either playing in a mountain forest or making art. I was really obsessed with horses and I drew what I saw or painted what I saw back then.”

‘Playing with colors’: GSO artist Angie the Rose breathes vivid life onto her canvases

Since then, Barker has moved past representational art to the forays of abstract visualizations. Her pieces evoke images of the natural world like plants or horizons, but Barker explains that much of her work, particularly the Molecular Series for which she’s known, draws inspiration from the small molecules that make up our bodies. In July, she debuted her first solo exhibit named after the series at the Revolution Mill’s Central Gallery, and many of her pieces can be seen at area shops like Vivid Interiors, Tiny Greenhouse and Lao.

Barker says she started the Molecular Series, which is characterized by a cacophony of primary and secondary colors that branch across canvases, about six years ago during a difficult time in her life. The artist, who is now 32 years old, was going through a kind of quarter-life crisis and had just finished what she calls her Dark and Moody series, the first cohesive collection of art she made as an artist.

“It was kind of depressing,” she says about Dark and Moody. “I didn’t know what I was doing with my life but once I was done with the series and I had gotten all of this funk out of me, I realized that it was time to work with colors again. It was about embracing a healing process of sorts.”

At the onset of the series, the shapes Barker created tended to be more insular and closed off. More recently, she has been paying a woodworker to create cut-out wooden shapes to make the pieces more three-dimensional and open.

“In the beginning they were closed like a bud,” she says. “I was going through a hard time in my life, and the more I started healing, the more [the shapes] started opening up.”

Barker’s intent was to emphasize the importance of human bodies and what goes on beneath the surface. Part of that was finding a way to empower women through her art and depicting that gender or sex doesn’t limit any person’s capabilities in life.

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Artist’s daily diary of cuteness comes to Revolution Mill

A plum-colored octopus makes doughnuts in the kitchen, two tentacles whisking the contents of a bowl, another grasping vanilla extract. She cradles butter, an egg and three fresh doughnuts in her free tentacles. According to artist Jane Oliver, the image resonates with mothers who never seem to have enough hands.

Revolution Mill’s Central Gallery is showing a selection of Oliver’s latest works through Jan. 20. She earned her MFA in painting and printmaking from UNCG in 2002 where she taught drawing and art history courses for several years. From 2014 to 2016, she taught art history and introductory design at High Point University.

“One of the things you learn in school is the importance of keeping a sketchbook,” Oliver says. “A lot of students don’t like the idea when you turn it into a homework sort of thing but when it’s your own initiative, when you decide it’s important to keep continuing your exploration of different mediums, different things to draw, drawing from life, drawing from imagination, whatever, it’s for you and no one else. When I made a promise to myself last November [to draw every day], I thought: Well, how am I going to keep it?

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Anj ponders significance of black hair and other adornments

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“When my mama finished my hair she would pull the hair from the comb, sit it in her ashtray and burn it,” Anj writes in the first line of a tender poem nestled on her website beside a photograph of people with intertwined arms, their faces obscured — his wound up with gauzy cloth and hers by an encirclement of braided hair.

“Anj” is multimedia artist, writer and creative entrepreneur Ashley Johnson, a UNCG grad who grew up in Winston-Salem and who’s recently landed her first solo exhibit in the Central Gallery at Greensboro’s Revolution Mill. Reach, a selection of Johnson’s past and contemporary works that focuses on generational aspects of Southern femininity and black-hair identity, will find a home at the old textile mill through Aug. 12.

“The crux of my work and the crux of who I am today is tied to the practices of black hair,” she says.

Johnson’s mother chemically straightened her hair for as long as she can remember. She recalls picking at scabs from burns the relaxer’s hydroxides seared into her scalp, and years of back-of-the-mind curiosity about the natural layer of growth underneath.

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Agnes Preston-Brame leaves an impression at Revolution Mill

Preston-Brame in front of “Where Are We Going?” (2018). (photo by Lauren Barber)

Preston-Brame in front of “Where Are We Going?” (2018). (photo by Lauren Barber)

They say if you want to know what mood you are in, you best start singing,” she says. “Whatever song comes out of you, it will tell you.”

This is one of Agnes Preston-Brame’s firmly held beliefs, and for her it holds true for the colors on her painter’s palette.

Born in Budapest, she defected from Soviet-controlled Hungary and immigrated to the United States, where she felt she could become the artist she wanted to be without the threat of state censorship. She earned her fine-arts degree from New York University in 1971 before moving to Greensboro in 1986. When she’s not traveling the world, she splits time between her interior design firm, Metamorphosis Design, and painting in her home studio. Her latest exhibit, figurEtively speaking, which is on view in the Central Gallery at Revolution Mill, features her most recent works.

“What I do is depict emotions, attitudes,” she says. “Often, I have done paintings without facial character that people recognize as their daughter or someone. So, it’s a character of the body, the human form that interests me.”

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