"At the end of all of that there is a bright shiny rainbow waiting on you to just grab."
--Miami Souse Man
Angela Soliz is a fine artist, acrylic painter, educator and the founder of Gela Road, a creative resilience agency, who helps people uncover their identity and build purpose-driven lives from the inside out. Angela has 20 years of experience painting with acrylics and teaching. She is a teaching artist with Free Arts Arizona, an organization dedicated to working with kids in the foster care system and also teaches at The Drawing Studio and serves as adjunct faculty at Pima Community College. With a multidisciplinary background and a passion for climbing mountains—both literal and metaphorical—Angela brings a grounded, courageous approach to personal and creative transformation through art.
Artist Statement:
As an artist, I contribute to the project of human dignity through the exploration of self-liberation.
My goal is to capture the essence of ecstatic joy, in visual form. I have known feelings of profound extreme despair, grief, loss, heartbreak, shame and apathy but I had forgotten their opposites. Painting is my way to articulate wonder, joy, radical acceptance and other intense high sensation emotions that are avoided and subjugated. In this way, the act of painting is the practice of freedom. An exploration into the embodiment of ecstatic joy.
I use the language of the desert of Southern Arizona and my visual vocabulary is also heavily influenced by my Xicano roots and the cultural practice of magical realism.
Each painting carries the energetic vibration of freedom and the hope that it may remind the viewer of their own wonder, courage and inner divinity. It is imperative to the project of human dignity that we all individually remember the freedom we already have inside of us.