Maker Monday: Tucson painter Angela Pittenger turns light into the heart of her artwork

Every artist knows that light is what gives life to artwork, but Tucson painter and muralist Angela Pittenger’s work captures light itself.

Pittenger paints primarily with oil paint and watercolor to create her soft, almost dreamy works of art. Many of her pieces are impressionistic landscapes or depict animals and sentimental slices of everyday life. Her main subject, though, is light — golden-hour sunsets, sunlight sparkling off streams and oceans, or city lights on wet pavement.

“I like a lot of moody skies, I like golden lights, and I've recently started doing lightning,” she said.

Her style is influenced by her love of expressionism and painters like Monet and Van Gogh, as well as John William Waterhouse’s romanticism.

“At the risk of sounding cliche, I really like that,” Pittenger said. “They're masters for a reason.”

Her paintings, she said, take inspiration from many different sources. Some are recreated from her own photos, others were created plein air, or designed to capture a feeling.

“Sometimes it's a mood, and I'm like, ‘I need to paint something dramatic, and I need to do a moody sky’, and then I'll like look through pictures I have taken, or I follow some reference photo groups on Facebook and stuff, and I'll find a couple things and put them together. Other times I'll be somewhere and I'm like, ‘I need to paint that,’ and so I'll paint it,” Pittenger said.

A constant source of inspiration for Pittenger, she said, is her grandma, Stanla Gallardo. Gallardo was a painter also, and some of Pittenger’s first experiences with painting were accompanying her to painting classes.

“She used to go to this class at the library, and it was all these old ladies,” Pittenger said. “When I was probably 15 or 16, I started going to her class with her, because I wanted to learn how to paint, and I was the only one under 60 there.”

Pittenger said she often thinks of those memories with her grandmother, bonding over art and painting, and the advice Gallardo gave her.

“I’m a mess when I paint, especially all over my hands, my face, my grandma was the same way, so everybody in class would steer clear of our table, they always made fun of us because we were the messy ones,” she said. “She always told me, remember your darks and your lights, so when painting, I'm always thinking of contrast, because I have my grandma's voice in my head telling me that.”

Gallardo died in 2008, but Pittenger still keeps her grandmother’s old, wooden paint palette on the wall of her studio, along with a painting of sunflowers. Other paintings by Gallardo are scattered throughout Pittenger’s home.

A pastel-colored oil painting of lilacs that sits inside Pittenger’s studio is a loving recreation of a photo taken of her grandmother’s house.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

“When she died, I got her paint box, and I got a bunch of her photos that she had taken, and that one was in there,” she said.

Though she is most at home in her studio at her easel, Pittenger has also painted public and commissioned murals. One of her murals is displayed at Palo Verde Park and features vibrant yellow and purple flowers.

“They said, ‘we're gonna do like a pollinator type garden, something flowery,’ so I did sunflowers and other flowers, a nice bee and butterfly, those kinds of things,” Pittenger said. “I've also got one at the Teal Saguaro, which is the store run by TMC, and then I've done some private residences, and then inside did a doctor's office too.”

“This one family was very specific that they wanted this scene from Colorado, because they go there, and then they wanted me to put a couple musical instruments in there, because they go to the Bluegrass Festival,” Pittenger said.

Transitioning into larger-scale pieces and murals, Pittenger said, was intimidating at first, not just because of the size, but because of the vulnerability of the process.

“In your studio, nobody sees it, but when you're in public, you're not done, you do it in stages and you usually don't finish one in one day, so people see all the stages, and that was difficult for me,” she said. “I'm always nervous about people seeing something if it's not done, so that was intimidating.”

Pittenger said she found she enjoyed the community interaction and bringing her neighbors into her creative process.

“I actually enjoyed interacting with people, they'd walk by and ask me what I'm doing, and it was kind of fun.”

Currently, Pittenger has pieces hanging in two galleries, Raices Taller and Desert Garden Gallery, and she will be exhibiting two new pieces at an upcoming show also at Raices Taller.

“They do this show every year, it's monsoon theme or water theme,” she said. “I have two monsoon pictures in there, Tucson desert lightning pictures.”

In the future, Pittenger said she has aspirations for her own gallery and workshop space, where she can host classes.

“I really like working with kids,” she said. “So I think it'd be fun to work with kids, I haven't figured that out yet, so I don't have anything in the works, but my big dream would be to have a gallery space that's a gallery, but also a space for workshops.”