August 20, 2020

Angela Berkson | An Artist de Force

Full disclosure, Angela has been one of my closest friends since high school. She was my “arty” friend and it made me feel super cool to hang out with her. We were part of each other’s emotional support system all through college as she navigated art school and me architecture. Fast forward (and it has seemed fast!) a decade or so and I still love her and her work. She settled in Albuquerque, NM, where we both went to high school, and has an impressive list of solo and group exhibits as well as having been featured in Art in America, Alibi, the Albuquerque Tribune and other publications.

One of the mediums that she uses is encaustic, a painting technique using heated beeswax and pigment which gives the surfaces of her works a unique depth of color and texture. Because I’m a big fan, we have one of her pieces, a rotating arrow, in the window at our office. The arrow can literally spin and point up or down – we use it to telegraph the mood of the office sometimes. In Angela’s words: “that work came out of my desire to produce “interactive” art. I was thinking about how analog and old-school my encaustic paintings are. I am literally making my own paint by hand, using techniques developed by the ancient Egyptians. But the kind of visual art that is getting the most attention today is digital and interactive art that utilizes computerized technology that allows viewers to not only react to what they see, but also interact with it — to affect the outcome of the artwork’s appearance. Anyway, it ends up being kind of a visual pun when I called this “digitally interactive” because you take your hand (digits) and move the art (interactive).”