Sandy and Jerry

This is a video embed test for Sandy Mastroni. Do not adjust your blog. We will be back to our regularly scheduled nonsense before you can hit delete. If you're cool, you'll take the time to enjoy this wonderfully strange video, resulting in lower blood pressure.
Later gators,
Ronnie

[Re]defining me

I am Angela Recada.

I am a self-taught artist.

Much of my life, who I am has been defined by others.  I have been a reflection of their idea of who I am, and I accepted their ideas.  I have been a daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin, friend, wife and mother.  These roles will always be an important part of who I am.

But I have also been an employee, a marketing coordinator, a public relations manager, and a Vice President in my career in publishing, in banking and with several very large, very well-known corporations.  These were all transient titles someone else gave me to define my role at a given point in time.  I accepted these titles and the roles I was given.

Over  twenty years ago, I gave up these titles and roles.  I chose to focus primarily on motherhood and family, becoming at times a free-lance writer, jewelry-maker and watercolorist, too.  Now, with my children grown and well on their way to leading fulfilling and productive lives of their own, I am, for the first time, free to define completely who I am.  And who I will be from now on.

Throughout my life, I was more my father's child than I ever realized.  He, too, is a self-taught artist.

portrait of me as a young child (unfinished)

by my father

oil on board

I was born in Canada to German immigrants, both of them had been impoverished children in war-torn Germany.  As the daughter of a self-taught artist/engineer and a young full-time mother, I grew up with few material things, but was always surrounded by art, music and books.  And we traveled.  Everywhere we went my father painted watercolors.  At  home, there was always an easel with a painting in progress set up in the living room.  To this day, the smell of turpentine brings childhood memories flooding back to me.

My first love was always art, and one of my first memories is "helping" my father with an oil painting when I was three years old.  That painting hangs in my living room today.

Neither encouraged nor discouraged by my parents, I sketched and drew anything and everything for the next 10 years.  But eventually I became more interested in the written word.  I read voraciously, and I wrote lengthy, tortured poems and wordy, complex stories.

Finally, armed with university degrees in my beloved English and German, I entered the corporate world, as was expected of me.  There I learned to tighten my writing, to use only the most essential words in the advertisements, news releases, newsletters, brochures and the articles I wrote for newspapers and national magazines.

In my life so far, I have lived in Canada, Germany and the US, and I have been greatly influenced, as well, by my many travels throughout North America and Europe.  

I realized at an early age that neither the world nor the universe revolved around me.  I see myself as a small dot in the continuum of life in this vast universe, and I'm grateful for my time and place here.

No longer a reflection of anyone else's ideas of me, I now use only my first and middle names.  Angela.  Recada.  When I create art, I am truly myself, not a reflection of my father or my husband, or anyone else.

And so,  I return to my first love.  Art.

self portrait

2010

acrylic and mixed media

on 16 x 20 gallery wrapped canvas

I am Angela Recada.

I am a self-taught artist.