"Angela Bortone is an excellent artist who does paintings, drawings, public art projects (murals and yes, BUSES) and can basically do anything you'd ever need from a creative person."

— Adam Sprague

Art is like a little piece of the artist’s heart

Angela Bortone is a half Dominican, half Italian, grown up army brat who spent her formative years abroad in Heidelberg Germany. Like her art, her identity is split. American in many ways, but not entirely.

She approaches her portraiture as an act of reconciliation. It’s an attempt to merge the two selves into one, the interior self and the exterior self -- the self you see everyday against the face you only see through a mirror or lens.

The gap between mind and body inspires my art

As humans, we exist as both a swirl of conscious thoughts and the unconscious self-sustaining body. My work pairs fluid abstract mark-making with portraiture to reflect this duality.

The chaotic abstraction are moments before thoughts become words, when everything is just feeling. I’m interested in charged mental states and the unseen interior. It's a representation of moments where I struggled to express myself, not having all the language to traverse the divide between thought and word.