Angela McEvilly

I am a painter I am a method painter, I can move my paint strokes to certain beats when painting as I sometimes like to express large stokes of paint using only my fingers on the canvas, no brush, playing with the paint and watching it move into place.  I find it fascinating when paint just finds its own way and you know you can never reproduce that same section, you carefully work around it because you know that it’s something important in the painting, just like when you know you’ve over worked a painting. Painting is my therapy. I do not box myself off though with creating, I like to explore with any medium I think I can manipulate, and I like a challenge. Digital works challenges me. I can start off by taking a photo, or making a sketch, it is a learning process. Really everything only starts by having the right state of mind. If I am to create a sad painting I develop that feeling very much like an actor. I want to bring out our emotions that is why we are here? We were able to create a language. The first language of man. Letters come from visual representations used in accent cultures all over the world. It is a universal language and even animals can show some understanding from pictures, so it’s so important that we keep fighting for the arts.

My main problem lately has been nightmares, sleep deprivation is extremely frustrating, and so when I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and ME I felt my life had fallen apart and I was in these dreadful realistic nightmares. My mind would play games on me through my half-conscious body. I was to be haunted by the usual shadows standing at my door or at the bottom of my bed. Throughout my childhood I had suffered terrible nightmares. As an adult I understood now that if something was bothering me to the point of distraction, then I would paint it, it would be a bit like getting rid of that fear even if it was abstract it had to be painted. So I painted the Devil he was dominating my thoughts I was feeling down. Then I started to research all about the devil, it’s so interesting. What I did start to see was that during the Renaissance the image of the devil was used frequently, I researched the bible realising that some of these images I was looking at had been the first images taught to me at school. For these images to still be so influential to human mind, to come through even in our dreams, shows the power of art. These are manmade images that we look at every day. The Devil, Beast, Beelzebub in whatever name you want to give the angel of light, he is part of our daily lives and we don’t even know it. I think this sinister time we live in also seeped into me, I wanted to express to people that these are manmade images, they are images that we all recognise, even in our dreams.