Andrada Anghel on Diving, Texture and a Large-Scale Corporate Installation

Romanian-born, Canada-based painter Andrada Anghel, profiled on Singulart, traces her layered, tactile practice to a childhood of improvised materials — painting on dictionary fabric covers, making clay and jewelry from dried chestnuts and leather. She credits three forces: growing up in Romania, where she learned to see beauty in small things; immigrating to Canada, which gave her room to reinvent herself; and diving, especially in Mexican cenotes, which reshaped her understanding of light and color. For years she did not call herself an artist until college teachers urged her to trust her eye. Two works anchor her current profile: "A Bloom You Can Hear," an intuitive abstraction about inner listening, and "Golden Lilies of the Cenote," drawn from diving and travel. Texture, she says, lets a painting become an object with its own history. Her series Life From Above — Aerial Textures grew out of satellite images and old maps of ancient cities and river deltas; another series responds to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia's Afar region, with only one painting, Alien Planet, remaining. She is now developing several series simultaneously and a large multi-panel installation for a corporate building. Commissions, she says, push her limits and keep the practice evolving. She hopes viewers pause and find their own stories in the layers.