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.”
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.