Angela Morgan page

From Magazin Art (Summer 2007) courtesy of the publisher.

Angela Morgan: From Basketball to Art

Angela Morgan had no intention of becoming an artist. She grew up in Pense, Saskatchewan, a neighbour of Joe Fafard, the sculptor. On occasion, she would visit his studio, and be impressed with the sights and smells, but it wasn’t an inspiration for her.

A star basketball player in high school, she won an athletic scholarship to Bismarck State College in North Dakota where she studied Business Administration. She took one art course her first year, and by the end of that year, her art instructor had convinced her to change her major to art.

After her second year, she was restless and set out to see more of the world. She traveled through the United States and Europe, eventually ending up in Montreal where she studied at Concordia University. Then it was to the University of Regina for a year before ending up in Calgary where she finally earned her BFA in 2007.

She started in the Master’s Program at the University of Calgary, but now married and pregnant with twins, she deferred her second year and she and her husband decided to move to Fernie, B.C. for a year. There they built a studio, and after her deferral was over, they decided not to return to Calgary.

“It would have been nice to have a MFA, and the teaching credentials that went with it,” says Morgan, “but, in Fernie, I had what I really wanted: a full on studio.”

Morgan has two employees in her studio, Judy and Sue, who take care of all the logistics of a busy studio: building frames, and shipping crates, taking care of the inventory, gallery contacts, anything that could eat into her time at the easel.

“When you have children, you want to be at home. So I put the kids to bed at eight and work until about one. That’s my schedule. Sometimes I’ll work the odd day, but Judy and Sue make sure that all I have to do is paint.”

Her subject matter is almost exclusively female characters, done in an impressionistic style, with broad strokes and bold bright colours. They are simple characters, unsophisticated, yet many of them have an earnest self-awareness that is endearing and strikes a chord with the viewer.

“Angela is full of passion, full of life,” says Dennie Segnitz of the White Rock Gallery, “and it shows in her paintings. I love the way she uses impressionistic patchwork to portray her characters. I love it when there is an economy of stroke and it’s a very simple impressionist painting and it still evokes feelings. Her characters are whimsical, usually playful, innocent, sometimes melancholy, they strike a chord in your heart.”

The secret to her appeal, however, may be the universality of her characters. There’s your goofy cousin when she was at that awkward stage, and there’s your grandmother when she took your little sister, all dressed up, out to tea for the first time, and there are all the maiden aunts in the family, the ones that congregate in the kitchen at every family gathering.

“They love their clothes,” says Segnitz, “they love to play dress up, with hats and ribbons and bangles, and styles that seem to belong to a more innocent age.”

When asked if there’s a feminist theme in her work, Morgan laughs and says, “I don’t think about it, but I can’t argue that it’s not there.”

Morgan works exclusively in oils. “I like to work back into my paintings, and I can’t do that with acrylics. I prefer the quality of the colour that oils provide; acrylics can be flat. I use a broad palette and I want my colours to be bold and bright. Earlier on, I used to plot my use of colour but it’s much more intuitive now, and oils are better for my style of painting.” Angela Morgan lives in Fernie, British Columbia with her husband Brendan and their four children.