Angel Sanders b. 1972

Angel Sanders is a longtime Chicago resident who has been a South Side studio artist since 2024. Her creative process is spontaneous, serving as a daily exercise in intuitive color and scale decisions. While drawing, Sanders often covers both sides of the paper with rhythmic fields of multicolored flowers. Working with a combination of markers, gel pens, and colored pencils, she alternates between bold and delicate mark-making. Her drawings are defined by uneven rows of distilled flower forms set against the paper’s raw white surface, reminiscent of botanical illustrations or floral textile patterns. While repetition grounds her work, the flowers are occasionally interrupted by depictions of other universal symbols—hearts, casual smiley faces, or color-blocked pentagons representing houses. Sanders frequently embellishes these compositions with playful trails of decorative dots, dashes, and wavy underlines.

Each flower’s bloom features a flat, button-like center, surrounded by a scalloped ring of petals. Some flower heads float freely. Others are anchored by rigid stems with either a single lateral leaf or pairs of leaves that resemble the tight symmetry of neatly tied bows. Flowers often appear to lean or sway, perhaps suggesting a passing breeze. This display of shifting momentum feels less like a standard landscape and more like a visual record of time passing.

“My favorite flowers are yellow daisies and red roses. I like picking flowers and tomatoes in the backyard garden in the summertime. My drawings are like flowers outside in the ground. I like to start a drawing at the top, in the corner. I’ll finish a whole row before going on to the next one, taking my time.”