About the Artist

I’m Angela Justice, an abstract painter working primarily in watercolor.

My paintings are abstract, but they have subjects. I just don’t always know what the subject is when I begin.

I take things in—a place, weather, color, a conversation, something I keep noticing—and then I paint. I’m not trying to translate any of it literally. Often I recognize the source only afterward, when I look back at photographs or think about what had been occupying me and suddenly understand where a palette, shape or intensity came from.

I rarely begin with a fixed image. I start with a loose sense of structure and then work with what happens. I flood, lift, scrape back, obscure and rebuild. The process becomes a negotiation in real time between what I intended and what is actually happening on the surface.

I work on paper as well as stretched and unstretched canvas, and I often prepare the surface before I begin. That lets me push watercolor in different directions while keeping the transparency and movement I love about the medium.

I spent years as a dancer, and I think I still approach composition much like choreography. I work on the floor, moving around the painting and paying attention to rhythm, weight, direction and space—where something needs more tension, where it needs to open up, and when to trust what’s already there.

I also studied neuroscience, spent years as a C-suite biotechnology executive, and now work as an executive coach and advisor to senior leaders. That work finds its way into the paintings too. Sometimes it is a question that keeps recurring across conversations. Sometimes it is a moment when I can feel something changing in someone. I don’t set out to paint it, but afterward I can often see that I did.

What interests me most is what happens next. Something stayed with me strongly enough to become physical through paint. Then the painting leaves my studio and enters someone else’s home or workplace, where it becomes part of a different experience.

Before watercolor, I created sculptural work from hand-foraged and preserved mosses, lichens and other botanical materials. That work has been shown in two solo exhibitions and is held in private collections across the country. I still take on select botanical commissions, with timing shaped by the foraging and preservation process.