Women in Art 278 Magazine March 2014 | Page 16

website facebook pinterest american artist Angela Treat Lyon painting & sculpture I make art because I must. It’s a cellular need. Images dwell within me getting fat and juicy until they just simply will not allow me to sit on them one more minute. Many many nights I’ll wake up with designs in my head, all clamoring to come out at once, and I’ll have to get up and draw furiously till they’re out and happy. When I was very young, I made a pact with myself not to do any artwork that depicts pain and suffering – why paint that when we see so much of it all around us, every day? I want to see and surround myself with expressions of the feeling I had in my heart about how I feel it could be, and really is, on levels we don’t normally think about or have visual access to during the glaring light of day. I intend my work to do with joy, celebration, and the great, incredible depths of the invisible world that we inhabit, that inhabits us, and that swirls in un-nameable curling, flowing eddies in and all around us all the time. Mood, emotion, feeling and the underlying spirit – this is what I love. I prefer strange color combinations and exaggerated bodies and movement to depict emotion. The motion of the body; the expression of the heart; the glory of color; the voices of joy and wonder and connection with each other; the unity we each have with Spirit: these are the things that matter to me, that I draw, paint, and carve. ART The older I get the looser my work seems to become. My hand flies, and my mind feels alive and connected to some amazing, enormous, endless source. I’m delighted with this work, no matter the medium – it makes me happy. wom en