Angela Battle

Associate Professor of Art, Painting
Office Location: 333 Fine Arts Center
515-271-3831
angela.battle@drake.edu

Associate Professor Angela Battle has an interdisciplinary education. She received her B.F.A. in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1980 and returned to complete a B.S. in Biology in 1996. She continued her education at the University of New Mexico to complete an M.F.A. in Painting in 1999. She has taught at Drake University for the past 13 years as the major professor in painting. She also teaches several interdisciplinary courses that reflect her scholarly interests in the intersections between art and the natural world. She has exhibited nationwide from San Francisco, California to Richmond, Virginia.

The study of clouds, shape shifting, elusive and only momentarily categorized has moved my work in many ways from the plein-air recording of my presence in landscapes to the body of work represented here where notions of the sky as a tenuously limpid skin enveloping the nearly round earth (as it increasingly erupts with obscuring fissures) are explored from both the realist’s and the romantic’s perspective. I extract skies out of newspaper images such as images of smoke during the uprising in Libya or clouds over Joplin, Missouri after the tornado, and re-present these cropped meteorologies in gouache to juxtapose with ambiguous and, often upside down meteorologies in acrylic. Fleeting attentions and plastic distractions square off as the ecology of the planet continues to erode. Human and planetary traumas play against the increasing distractions provided by technology and culture. Captured (right side up) meteorology contrasts with imaginary (upside down) meteorology. The work suggests a troubled ecology of displaced empathy.