Local artist celebrates creepy creatures all year long
By NICOLE HENNESSY, Westlife
ROCKY RIVER – A vampire lovingly hugging a stunned teddy bear; happy little witches flying on broomsticks; a jack-o-lantern car on pink-frosted donut wheels howling down the road, navigated by a pile of cute but menacing bats, eyes glowing yellow.
Angela Oster’s delicate and expressive creepy characters are perfect for Halloween. Or all year long.
When she’s not painting and drawing, the Rocky River artist and Parma native works part-time at Ohio Citizen Action, which organizes and mobilizes people to advocate for social justice and public interest campaigns. Her unique artwork has become a recognizable throughout Northeast Ohio and nationally. She sends little monsters and prints out all over through her etsy.com shop: anjelajoyoster.
Making use of a rare space that isn’t political or tense, Oster said she hopes her artwork brings joy. At art festivals throughout the region, she’s watched, amused, as customers flipped through her prints, seeing parts of themselves in her monsters and ghouls, or just smiling as they browse through her endless catalogue.
“I want to delight,” Oster said. “I want people to laugh, and be delighted, and be entertained, in a way. Maybe a little appalled sometimes,” she laughed.
Her website bio on angelaoster.com says she haunts Rocky River. Along with her husband, who’s also an artist, and their daughter. Oster studied at the Cleveland Institute of art. Her spooky bats and ladies are hard not to fall in love with.
Cincy Comicon provides boon to nerds, entrepreneurs: PHOTOS
The Cincy Comicon brought hundreds of comic book fans, artists, writers and enthusiasts to the Northern Kentucky Convention Center Sept. 9-11, but it also provided a huge platform for local entrepreneurs.
The Cincy Comicon was created in 2014 by four friends and longtime veterans of conventions with the mission of returning to the roots of a comic convention: comic books.
...Smith was also there for one of the same reasons Angela Oster, a Cleveland-based artist, was: to find an audience.
Oster is an artist and illustrator who was also debuting her first comic: "Little Vampire Girl." She had been to different art events throughout the Cleveland area and as far South as Dayton, but the Cincy Comicon was her first comic convention.
'I like to draw things that are weird and funny and cute,' she told me. 'I wanted to find people who like the same kind of weird. I wanted to find my tribe.'"