The Art of Quiet

ITAS Podcast Episode #11

This time, we are talking to a wonderful abstract artist and my sister-in-arts Angelique Bacia about becoming an international artist and her latest creative explorations of “quiet” art.

As usual, here we are giving you a short excerpt of Angelique explaining what “painting quiet” means to her.

But the entire conversation is full of discussions and observations on our pandemic experiences, injecting positivity into the world, what money means to artists, and how we use Clubhouse. For all of this, listen to the full episode!

What does it mean to create “quiet” art?

I’m a painter. I create abstract art. I follow what feels right. Sometimes there’s a lot of texture, sometimes there’s not. Sometimes it’s about a feeling, sometimes it’s about thought.

I am so focused on creating “quiet”, and I don’t know what that means yet. I’m creating stuff that I think evokes a sense of quiet, or a sense of peace, or a sense of serenity. I think I need it more ever since the beginning of the pandemic. My studio is in my apartment and it used to be incredibly quiet during the weekdays while I worked, and I enjoyed it. When we went into lockdown, now, everyone’s home all day, and my world got incredibly noisy.

Pay attention, there’s so much noise…

I didn’t realize just how much noise there was around me until I started paying attention to it. When you get into the car, there’s a lot more noise than you even are aware of, because we’re just so desensitized. When you’re home, there are dogs barking, kids crying, people yelling at each other, there are car horns, or wind rushing through the trees, there are birds singing… There’s all of that noise. I found that I was desperately trying to capture that peace and quiet that I experienced before. It felt very disruptive to me.

What is quiet? Is it a texture? Is it a color? Is it a depth? What does that mean in painting form? What is this? For some people, it’s the ocean. It’s the colors of the ocean or the sound of the waves. For other people, it’s being in a forest and hearing a babbling brook, and being surrounded by greenery.

If my art makes just one person happier…

My art is meant for everyone else. Everything is about putting something positive out into the world – something to make people feel better, feel happier, feel calmer, feel easier, feel prettier, feel whatever because I feel like there’s so much negativity in the world. For me, I want to inject something positive.

That has all led to this sense of quiet, which to me is the bigger overall theme that I want to instill into the world. I want to give people a place where they can feel that every time that they look at my painting. I don’t know if I have a Superman complex, but I feel like I need to save the world. I want to try to help the next person, so they don’t have to feel the way I felt. It’s always been about trying to help in some way.