A Savannah-based artist emerges out of the darkness into the light of creativity

“My hope is that I’ll get to that place where I am very successful, and I am a household name, and I am influencing other people like I’ve been influenced,” artist Angela Roe told me while we sat outside City Market talking about her work.

It’s an ambitious goal for the emerging artist, who didn’t begin showing until 2022, and who has never had a solo exhibition. But for the talented and business-savvy Roe, I’m almost convinced that it will happen.

Equality, Illinois

As noted above, Roe is still new to the Savannah art scene. Her expansive cloud paintings and emotion-heavy abstracts are just starting to find their way into galleries around town. Her artistic practice, however, “started before I was making full sentences,” she said, in spite of an upbringing that would deter most artists before they even began.

Born in the tiny south Illinois town of Equality, and raised in an evangelical, Pentecostal household, Roe didn’t grow up surrounded by art or art lovers. Her parents fought constantly, a situation the artist described as “World War III,” so Roe needed to find salvation somewhere, and art became her “way out.”

“I spent a lot of time by myself,” she related. “And I have a lot of really fond memories, but I know that when things were intense or I was in places where I didn’t want to be, I would draw.”

Her parents knew next to nothing about art, however, and her family was poor, so it was mostly a solitary activity with little support. Oftentimes she would grab her notebook and just draw and endlessly watch the sunset, staying away from home to avoid the chaos.

By the time the she was in fifth or sixth grade, she was spending a lot more time drawing than doing school work, and her grades were suffering as a result. Fortunately, one of her teachers saw that Roe had some talent, and shared one of the drawings that they’d confiscated with her mother. That began the process of turning the rising middle-schooler from a troubled kid doodling in the margins to the “art kid” who helped with homecoming and senior prom. She transitioned from copying things others made to making works born of her own internal struggle. And she started being recognized for her efforts.

“That was when I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got something here,’” she recalled thinking at the time. “I can get out of this town. I can go do something different.’”

Moving Forward with Fashion

Having found her path, Roe eventually moved to Chicago to attend the Illinois Institute of Art. Once she escaped Equality, however, the artist was determined to find a viable, lucrative career, and that wasn’t making art for art’s sake.

“If I’m gonna go to college, I’ve got to make money,” she said, a philosophy that led her to eschew drawing in favor of training for a career in fashion. “I had to pay my way, I had to work full time while I was there. And so, I learned more about the marketing side and the management side of the fashion industry, and that it would open a lot more doors.”

By her senior year, she was offered an opportunity to work for Target out of New York, overseeing more than a dozen stores, beginning a career that would span the next 15 years of her life. She got married and had a kid, and created the kind of home she never got to experience growing up.

But in late 2019, facing postpartum depression after the birth of her second child, as well as the COVID-19 global pandemic immediately afterwards and the death of beloved grandparents who’d helped raise her, things started to change for the artist who’d long ago put down her pencils. “I kind of got back to that dark place where I was as a kid,” she said.

It was 3 a.m., and Roe was tossing and turning in bed, difficult thoughts swirling through her head, when the artistic muse reappeared.

“I was feeling kind of alone and in this dark place with my son, and not knowing how to get out of that,” she recalled of the pivotal moment. “And I started painting.”

'You have to be where you are and go from there'

“Portals I,” the painting that came of that late night inspiration, is a chaotic abstract, covered in gold leaf, gestural shapes, and scribbles that imply language. It would become the first of a series that continues to this day, one where the artist simply allows her emotions to speak through her brushes, but which is surprisingly planned out and carefully executed.

“Oddly enough I would say that the abstract ones I spend a little more time planning, because I do get the image from a visual,” Roe explained. “I feel like it’s a glimpse of my spirit. I feel like it’s something that’s inside of me.”

On the other side of Roe’s artistic coin are explorations of realism, in particular studies of the sky and the clouds, a callback to her days as a child spent watching the sunset while avoiding life’s chaos. They’re staggeringly beautiful, and mostly off-the-cuff, skies remembered by the artist from days past. Combined, the two styles work together to tell the full tale of Angela Roe the artist ― a tale of hardship, redemption, and rediscovery.

“There was a whole year where I was like, ‘Man, if I would have just kept going from when I was younger, imagine where I’d be,’” Roe recalled. “Well, you gotta let that go. You have to be where you are and go from there.”

Find Angela Roe on Instagram @FrontRoeStyle.

For those struggling with postpartum depression, the Maternal Mental Health Collective of Savannah offers resources. Visit listentomoms.org for more information.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah-based artist worked through postpartum depression by painting