Angela Dagostino

My family of origin always valued creativity and self-employment; we were all working-class people. My interest in painting and drawing started at a very early age. For a life lesson, I learned in kindergarten that I could hold a brush in my hand and stand at an easel. It was so satisfying to be able to express myself in a positive way without using words, and the sky was the limit. I found creating a visual example for another person was an economical way of communicating. It was quick. I was born and raised in California. When I was younger, in school, I spent time traveling to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. I loved to absorb the experiences of life in far-away places. And traveling through other exotic lands that were so different from my own culture shaped how I interpreted my life and new ideas. This privilege of traveling gave me a deep appreciation for art as I witnessed it in the everyday life and depth of people from around the world. I reveled in being a complete tourist. Upon returning home to California, I incorporated these memories of time spent away into my artwork. It is a simple and powerful strategy for me that I draw on to create my artwork. I trained at WVOC to become a graphic commercial artist after high school. This is where I learned to paste up and lay out advertisements, corporate point-of-purchase signs, logo design, photo retouching, airbrush, hand lettering, illustration, along with other tools for the trade. I worked as a commercial artist for several years before returning to school at LCAD to study figurative painting and drawing, color theory, 3D design, mixed media, photography, and so on. Around that time, I began to show my paintings in group shows and solo shows, locally, nationally, and internationally. My work is being collected. It now has evolved primarily into paintings on canvas, wood, or metal, although I will sometimes feel the need to utilize other mediums too (installation or large wall spaces for mural work) as needed for a more specialized result. It all depends on what I think will work best to successfully achieve a particular result for a project. Each work starts with me imagining something beautiful and something unique that I am able, with the tools I have been given, to produce. All the work is one of a kind and original and can take days or even years to complete. It depends upon when I feel that I have done my best. And when I feel that I can walk away from it, that I know it is complete. This current set of flower paintings on the hardboard is a reminder of Spring. Spring is promised. I can still remember walking through the flower market in Holland, in the dead of winter. It is still on the walls of my mind. It is a remembrance of how bitter and painfully cold the winter season is and can make me forget about the memory of flowers. When you see a flower...what does it mean to you? It means to me that we're loved, don't forget, still loved! ...it is promised.