The Stories We Tell

In November 2020, the world was well into peak pandemic fatigue. Paired with shorter days, cold weather, and dying greenery, it was hard to find color in such bleak settings. The month perfectly encapsulated the feeling of walking into winter during a time that already held innate darkness.

For artist Angela Rowe, a late-blooming persimmon tree in her neighbor’s yard exuded a ray of hope. She painted it with a lone yellow chair with a single fruit on the ground and an almost ominous front door inviting one to wonder what’s beyond.

“This painting speaks to a couple of things,” Rowe says. “During the pandemic, we all had lawn chairs outside, that’s how we said hello to each other. I loved the fact it was November and there are these bright fruits paired with the front door that kind of hovers in space. I’m intrigued with inviting people to participate in the painting in a personal way, for the painting to have a mood to it. I’m interested in what a person can introduce their own story to.” 

Rowe’s own story includes a circuitous route to her craft. She always loved art, and her childhood held mostly drawings of dogs and ballerinas. She took her first art class in 2013, collage mixed media at Cameron Art Museum. Later, working on IT global projects for IBM found her doodling in meetings to organize her thoughts. Art had always been calling, yet she decided to pursue a career first and creativity later.  

“When I got started, my friend suggested classes at Cape Fear Community College,” she says. “Then I met professor Ben Billingsley and got my Associate in Fine Arts. It’s really one of the best things I’ve done. It’s an education in drawing and painting. I have a big debt of gratitude to the faculty there.”  

A late but adept learner, Rowe began to focus on lush oil paintings that display wondrous everyday things. Her Homegrown Series was inspired by her upbringing in the Pisgah Forest of North Carolina. She then looked inward to her now-home of Wilmington, be it ripe peaches in baskets at Eagle Island Seafood or fish on display at Motts Channel Seafood. 

Each of us holds memories with food. It could be collards plucked from the garden and prepared by grandparents, the smell of chicken coated in egg yolk and flour while frying in crackling grease, or the way juices from a ripe cantaloupe drip down your chin in the height of summer. 

“If I’m going to do a painting about okra, it’s not just about okra,” Rowe says. “I’m looking for something that evokes a feeling. In Cantaloupes, that’s Eagle Island in the dead of summer. You can smell the cantaloupe. We brought home one and ate it, it was warm and ran down our chins. That’s what I want the painting to be about.” 

Collards become not just a vegetable but a lush color palette of lavender and green juxtaposed by the royal blue bin they were placed in. Onions could be seen as simple minced ingredients, but Rowe communicates pearlescence and beauty while leaving subjectivity on the table. 

“I know people who say they eat to live and live to eat. I’m more on the live-to-eat side,” she laughs. “Before Hurricane Florence, I went to Motts Channel with a friend, and she brought home two Spanish mackerel. I asked her to take some photos for me before she cut them up. Jack and Charlie’s Supper were the mackerel she made for her grandchildren. I’ll have fishermen come in, see that painting and say, ‘Oh, I love catching them.’ People can relate to food because it’s part of who we are, they’re reacting to their memories and thoughts.” 

Mountain Apples 1-4, speak to Rowe’s childhood. She used her grandmother’s piano throw to add pattern. Mountain Apples 3 displays a rushed decadence with apples spilling from an earthy green bowl alongside ornate glassware. Mountain Apples 1 shows organization while communicating reflection and color from a fruit that is anything but simple. 

“I am fascinated with reflective color; everything projects its color. I love painting glass and metal for this reason. I love the way it distorts. If I’m painting apples, I need to understand how does the inside work, how does it curve out and in,” she says. “It’s just a world I get to go live in, this world of what’s happening on the canvas.”

One could view the flat and sometimes empty farmland of eastern North Carolina as commonplace scenery or just another car ride. Not Rowe. Her annual anniversary trip with her husband to the North Carolina Zoo became The Road Home. She captures how the sky changes from cool to warm as the day passes over flat landscapes, and the comfortable feeling of a drive as we inch closer to our destination. Home differs for all of us, but viewers can imagine their own tangible haven. 

Rowe plans to continue focusing on food, including red okra, trout and even ricefields, which she deems quintessential Carolina. In her space at Acme Studios, she hopes to tell narratives that find a home in another viewer’s interpretation.

Even as a late bloomer, Rowe is finding her rhythm and response while encouraging others to take a second look at daily occurrences. 

“We do this because we can’t not. It’s fundamental, we have to paint, make, create in some way. It was always on my bucket list to be an artist,” she says. “I feel grateful when someone responds to my painting, it’s an honor if you engage with it. That’s the luxury of being an artist. I paint what moves me and if it moves somebody else, that’s the icing on the cake.”