Process
Mandie Colangelo rarely begins with a plan. A painting starts with a feeling or a color, and the first marks are made on instinct.
“I love allowing the process itself to guide the final result.”
Mandie Colangelo
She came to painting after years in fashion, jewelry, photography, design and building, and that history shows in a designer's eye for structure and a maker's ease with unconventional materials. Street inks, acrylic, resin, pigment powders, spray paint, fabric and collage all have a place in the studio, often within a single work.
Surface
It often begins with the surface. Spray paint drifts across the panel in soft layers, and pigment powder is dusted over it while still wet, until the ground holds a quiet atmosphere of its own. Much of it will later be covered, but it continues to glow through everything that follows.
Pour
Pouring sits at the center of her practice. Color is loaded along the top edge and allowed to fall, each layer running over the last, so earlier colors stay visible between later ones. Gravity sets the composition, and the artist decides when to stop it.
Structure
Elsewhere, bands of color are poured side by side and tilted, so they travel together across the surface. Larger works are often assembled from separate panels, with bare wood left exposed, its raw grain a warm counterpoint to the gloss of the paint.
Gesture
Against these quieter grounds, gesture arrives all at once. Paint is flung across the surface in a single movement, cutting through the color beneath. Careful layering prepares the ground; one unplanned gesture decides the painting.
Music
Through all of it, color carries the meaning. The reds hold intensity, the blues hold stillness, and gold runs through the work like a thread of light.
Music is never far away. She wrote music before returning to painting, and the work carries its sense of rhythm and tempo. The musical titles many paintings hold, Barcarolle, Rubato, Ritornello, the Ostinato series, reflect that quality.
A painting is finished when it feels true to what began it. Sometimes that takes an afternoon, sometimes weeks.
The result is a body of work full of energy, surprise and emotion, where the eye keeps returning to discover how each painting came together. Her current studio is in Monterey, California.