Michele Dangelo
Memories inspire my work. A critical component of my work is a basic icon - a house, dress, or boat - that proposes challenging, thoughtful ideas and speaks to the human condition. Each picture is a multi-generational storehouse of memory and experience. Simple, yet complex, iconic images in my work have come to suggest a range of emotions... because the forms are more conceptual than real they reflect the ambiguous and evoke the ambivalent. Often they trigger a longing for pleasure, comfort, security and permanence, while transcending borders, cultures, and socio-economic class.
I often detail a single house with only a window or door-risking with innovative use of color. Abstracted images and mark making, in combination with innovative use of color, create the essential elements of my work. I spend significant time finding the correct color or shade to convey a specific feeling because to me color is not just color, it is revealing - one's blue is another's yellow. To evoke emotion and self-reflection I push color sterotypes, at times using orange to trigger a pensive response or red to subdue rather than ignite. Palette knives, rags and other materials add texture and depth to my choice of color, creating an interesting surface that denies specifics yet suggest place, time and attitude.
I am continually challenged by the notions of free expression and a distinct hand to create work that has more to do with the viewer's perception than my intention.
Paintings remain the same, but are subject to differing responses and interpretations as times change. Those that survive cultural, aesthetic and historical shifts share some of the characteristics that can be seen in my work. I want to make sure that my work is accessible and my images easily remembered. They open doors for discussion.
Michele Dangelo, a Boston resident, left a business career to pursue art in 1990. Primarily self-taught, she has spent little time in classes, preferring to look and experiment. Her inspiration is Robert Henri, the American Realist painter, who said, “Let nothing but the things which are of utmost importance to you have any place. The more simply you see, the more simply you will render.”
"Home can be shelter, refuge, place of solace and comfort or crucible of suffering and heartbreak. Writers as diverse as Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neil and Henrik Ibsen have used the theme of home and all the many meanings that word can evoke for us in their writings. Similarly, noted artist Michele Dangelo uses home as a leitmotif in her paintings.
Stunning in their use of color, Dangelo's paintings are vibrant in their intensity. Set off against a gorgeous palette of lush color are the stark, hard edged, sometimes almost bleak houses that dominate her canvases. These finely etched shapes fascinate us. They evoke layers of meaning for us. All the images of home are interlocked in these 'landscapes of the mind,' as Dangelo calls them."
-Laurie Carter Nobel