Angie Horsley first discovered art when she was just 17, thanks to Bradford’s recreation programs.
First, it was a course on sketching, then oil pastels with the late Joni Saunders. And then, like so many artists now living and working in the community, she took a course with Donnah Cameron and discovered the world of watercolor.
Over the years, Horsley has continued to take classes and workshops, mostly through the recreation centre, honing her craft and learning different techniques.
She has experimented with dye on silk, creating floral images that she still treasures and that hang on the walls of her Bradford home.
Through all the classes and the years spent mastering techniques, she has remained humble, insisting, “It’s a hobby.”
Horsley’s work in watercolor certainly had a modest beginning. “I just started with a cheap little eight-colour pack. I learned with that eight-colour pack ... to mix my own colours.”
Even now, she said, “I don’t have a super-big palette.”
While she now buys tubes of watercolour, selecting 30 or so colours, she still creates her own shades through mixing and often paints using only one or two colours to evoke misty scenes of lakes and trees.
“It’s the way you work with the paper, with the water,” she said. “Each step, you get a different effect.”
Horsley uses photographs to capture some of the images she transforms into her paintings.
“I take tons and tons and tons of pictures,” she said, often spotting a scene while driving and coming back to take a photo. “You just sort of see things.”
It’s a technique she has used while travelling with her husband in Arizona, New Mexico and Louisiana, snapping scenes that she hopes someday to paint back at her studio.
Her most popular paintings are watercolours of “northern trees” – pines fading into a misty background on the shores of a lake.
At SOYRA art shows and the BWG Studio Tour, Horsley generally sells several of her “tree” paintings, but they aren’t her favourites.
“My favourites are flowers,” she said.
Horsley has been busy this past month. Not only has she been helping the organizers of the BWG PASSION MADE Artisan Tour, she updates the event’s website and she has been painting to make sure she has at least 25 works, both new and old, to show.
That involves hunting for frames, something that Horsley calls “half of the fun!”
She hunts through thrift stores and garage sales, looking for wooden frames that are “nice, different,” she said, and then adapts them to her paintings. “I use a lot of recycled frames… I fix them, I paint them” for just the right look.
The first year that Horsley participated in the BWG Studio Art Tour, eight years ago, she opened the doors of her home studio – “a combination studio-living room” – to the public.
For the past several years, she has been part of the group show at Art in the Barn with fellow artists Stella Wadsworth, Maureen Joyce, Kathryn Bury, and this year, Corrine Donnelly.
Not having to rearrange the family home for the show takes the pressure off; instead, she can relax and concentrate on her painting.
“When you paint, your mind empties,” Horsley said. “It’s a calming, easy-going thing.”
She still insists that it’s “a hobby,” although she can spend hours at a time working on a single painting. She acknowledged: “I don’t do it for the money. I’m losing money… When somebody buys (a painting), it's such a thrill.”
And she is thrilled to be part of PASSION MADE this year.
“Everybody does everything a little bit differently. There’s no repeats,” Horsley said, citing a range of artistic visions that are shared with the community.
For information on the PASSION MADE artisan tour, see bwgstudiotour.ca.
