Angie Brooksby-Arcangioli

While chaos is blowing the world we knew to unknown waters, I jumped onto a new venue to surf the forefront of the art world. 

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it – Van Gogh

Catawiki is my new venue. It is a high-end auction service. You can bid for a Lamborgini, diamonds, antiques and curiosities. Bid on Chagall, Arman, Igor Mitoraj, Damien Hirst, Angie Brooksby or classy wine.

Their rep contacted me in October and I thought I’d give it a try to sell my floral abstractions.

“I paint flowers so they will not die.” – Frida Kahlo

>>   clic here to See my abstract floral paintings on auction this week. <<

You know me as a realist painter, read more to know why abstraction.

Were you born before digital?

If you were born before 1980 you saw suitcases without wheels, cars without seat belts, motorcycle drivers without helmets. We had 45 discs, LPs, Walkmen, cam recorders,floppy discs, CDs, DVDs,  then the FAX. And with the fax we found our first spammers. Do you remember all your paper being consumed by some smart Alec advertiser?

I spent hours creating hundreds of hand painted Christmas cards that I sent to my clients in North America from Florence. 

After getting a BFA in figurative sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I took my whheless suitcase to Florence, Italy to go to the Academia di Belle Arti. I stayed and obtained a vendor’s licence to sell my paintings in the piazza. During the ten years of street vending I sold over 500 hand made paintings each year, to tourists from around the globe. I was on the Today Show and all kinds of other TV programs and documentaries. The first cell phones came out. Mine was a fire-engine-red Nokia flip phone. I paid 1000 bucks for it. The bank called and asked if it really was me who spent all that. Yep! I wanted a mobile and my suitcase got two wheels.

Art galleries in Florence were unapproachable, especially for a foreign woman and a street vendor to beat. It was a Tuscan boys club and a small one. I bought my own art gallery on via Ghibellina, a few blocks from the Bargello museum and right around the corner from Gelateria Vivoli the best ice cream in Florence. My first husband —also a painter named D’Anchise — and I opened the doors the week the Twin Towers went down. We pressed credit card onto carbon copy receipts and deposited them at the bank. I built my first website from the first Macbook. We had ADSL that beeped and screeched. Half the time it didn’t work and it was expensive. I painted still-life of Italian cuisine and sold them like hot cakes.

I offered 1/2 day painting workshops in the hills of Florence. They were booked full all the time. My website: Tuscany-Paintings.com was n° 1 on Google. The algorithm wasn’t named yet.

In October 2006, five years later, I took my four wheeled suitcase to Paris and rekindled an old romance. Three months later, I moved there. I’d been hired to paint 50 large format Europeen landscapes for a luxury hotel in Texas. I had a 5 meter high atelier in an old tannery on the edge of Chinatown in Paris. It was a bohemian dream and so cold my fingers turned blue. 

We spent a summer on Long Island and I did a painting a day that posted on my blog, Vagabond Artist. I rented stands in Parisian art fairs and met my first real galleries. None had websites, Instagram was a baby. TikTok didn’t exist. We didn’t have face identification and two factor verification.

I quit sending hand painted Christmas cards and I auctioned my paintings on Ebay. I surfed the digital wave. I began posting painting videos on Youtube, signed up for FB and got sucked into the digital era. My Youtube channel is 18 years old. Amazing. 

The artist today has to paint with a selfie stick.

I worked with a very exclusive gallery called Terre des Arts, in Paris, Cannes and Saint Tropez. Posters of my shows were plastered all over Paris. I worked with In3Arts in Metz, and a gallery in Castellina in Chianti, and Arts-Range in Honfleur. They took my paintings to Art Luxembourg and Art Knokke in Brussels and other art fairs. Then I signed on with Carré d’Artistes and exhibited  all over the world from Paris , Lille, Amsterdam, NYC, Marseilles, Beirut, Cologne, Milan, Rome, Aix-In-Provence, Strasbourg, Sedona... I was painting what they wanted, contemporary street scenes of Paris and other cities. Angie the Artist was a creation of supply and demand.

Online galleries began contacting me, I signed with Singulart as one of their exclusive artists. 

Then the tide changed. The waters of the universe started churning and the strikes in Paris began. The yellow vests blocked all the highways. Protests demolished the streets in Paris and galleries closed. Charlie Hebdo happened, and the Bataclan. The galleries shut their doors. I had to get a job teaching English. When the galleries reopened, the epidemic arrived.. For the first time in my life, I worked as something other than an artist. 

I cried for a month, because I lost my identity. The dusty creation of Angie the artist blew away in the wind. 

After a month of teaching, I felt free. I loved teaching English. I rode the metro an hour in the morning, and taught 256 students every day. Then rode the metro home and began experimenting with acrylics and abstraction. It was 2019. The total freedom to paint whatever I wanted was frightening. I didn’t have to produce street scenes for galleries. That artist wasn’t the true Angie. But who is she? The thousands of oil paintings I made on the street in Florence and the hundreds of large format oil paintings of Parisian Nightscapes was my schooling. I mastered color. 

Then I left Paris for the French Riviera. And bought the Galerie Massillon in Hyères, (thanks Mom!) It is now my painting studio. The vegetation in Hyères is Mediterranean. The flowers are out of this world. Bougainvillea, jasmine, orange blossoms, cascading rose bushes of all colors, cactus flowers. I am inspired! I paint plein air to feel the wind in my hair and study the blossoms.

I consider these floral abstract paintings as décor.

I surf the new art world, hanging-ten on the wave of chaos, but this time I’m not crying. I am out front, leading the trend and creating beautiful decor. My inspiration is the harmonious color combinations of flower blossoms with their branches and leaves. The flowers of the mediterranean.

“I must have flowers, always, and always. ”
Claude Monet

My original paintings are currently available with.

• La Nouvelle Galerie Massillon – my atelier – Hyères
• Carre d’Artistes online
• Carre d’Artistes : Toulon, Marseilles and Paris Expo.
• Singulart
• Shanin Renee art dealer

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