Widewater resident Angela Morris has been selling art for three years, but creating it for much longer.

“I’ve been doing art since I was a little girl,” she says.

Morris enjoyed art in grade school and learned a lot in high school art class, but then she started working as a pilot. For the next 20 years, she didn’t make art.

“I put it away,” she says. “It wasn’t until I had a pretty big breakdown and my whole life changed” that she got back to it.

Her mother was the catalyst.

“She always said get into your artwork,” says Morris.

Her mother would put a colouring page or other medium in front of Morris and tell her to make something.

Art became an important part of Morris’ “journey through sobriety and recovery.”

Three years ago, Morris started selling her art at a market near her parents’ place. At that time, she was working a lot with sea glass picked up on beaches in Vancouver Island.

“Then I ran out of it,” she says.

Her dad came to the rescue and pointed out that various liquor bottles are shaped differently. A friend gave Morris a rock tumbler. She started tumbling glass.

“I love working with different materials,” says Morris.

These include painting sawblades, refurbishing items found in the dump, using pebbles to make scenes on canvas, painting windows, etc.

One refurbishing project was a smoker which she cleaned up and made into a planter.

“I really like doing murals,” she says.

In High Level, she painted the ceiling of a friend’s indoor golf company to look like the sky with birds flying overhead. In her backyard, she is painting a mural of the sky and water including birds and fish on her shed.

“I’m a detailed artist,” she says. “I don’t think there’s anything I can’t do. It challenges me.”

She likes using acrylic paint and pencil crayons.

In June, Morris’ art was up in The Fix in Slave Lake. She sells her art at the All Seasons Market in Slave Lake once in a while. She also goes to a market in Edmonton near Century Park.

Morris has a website where she blogs about her mental health journey. She also uses it for her art. It is wideopenspaces.ca.

In the future, she may also set up a small shop in front of her Widewater home. This would be on the honour system.

Sawblades are one of Angela Morris’ preferred types of canvas. It takes a lot of patience to get the paint to stick to the metal, she says.
Angela Morris likes to use found objects in her art. This one is made with pebbles.
Angela Morris with some of her art, including a mural on her shed which is still a work in progress.

by Pearl Lorentzen

This item copyrighted by   AlbertaChat.com / Lakeside Leaader   Slave Lake, Alberta

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