Gemstone Portrait Artist Angie Crabtree
The 2019 AGTA show in Tucson featured the work of a gemstone portrait artist. On display in Angie Crabtree’s booth were her oil paintings (figure 1) on canvas and panel. She also had a table with paints, palettes, and other supplies so people could see her at work (figure 2).
Crabtree’s portraits range in size up to 64 × 48 inches. She said people are excited to see gemstones in great size and detail. One painting can take more than 300 hours to complete. She said because people outside the gem and jewelry industry don’t always recognize the subjects as gemstones, the paintings can also be interpreted as abstract art.
The San Francisco–based artist said that all of her business, even from large corporate clients, comes from Instagram. “I’ve never paid to promote,” Crabtree said. “I’m just very fortunate for that.” Instagram also allows her to sell her own work instead of relying on galleries, which take a sizeable cut (typically around 50%). “That’s hard for artists,” she said. “Because of social media, artists have the opportunity to promote and market themselves.”
Crabtree grew up on a ranch in Sonoma County, California, and was interested in nature and geology from a young age. Her grandfather used to go gold mining, and she would collect obsidian and other rocks along the way. She began painting and taking art classes at the age of five, and by 12 she was teaching painting. She attended an arts high school and college, studied abroad at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009.
In 2012, while working as a high school art teacher, she did her first gemstone painting—a diamond portrait for an art gallery. She began painting different diamond cuts and posted them to Instagram. Soon people were asking for portraits of their engagement rings and other special stones. “That’s when it really took off,” she said.
One of the first people she met in the industry—via Instagram—was gemstone cutter Jean-Noel Soni of Top Notch Faceting. He told her about the gem industry and “completely opened my eyes,” she said. “That’s when I just fell in love with the whole thing.”
In 2015, she established her business and quit her teaching job. “It was a pretty big leap,” she said. “It’s scary for any artist to do that.” Within the first year, she was commissioned by Chopard and Forevermark to paint large series. Since then, business has grown to the point that she now has a studio manager who handles sales, accounting, and communication.
In 2018, Crabtree painted her first colored stone: an opal. “I wanted something a little bit more expressive and organic,” she said. Then came a tsavorite and an alexandrite, and she has since moved into sapphires and other stones. She plans to eventually paint minerals and other natural objects.
Crabtree was trained in realism, but she said her biggest struggle has been understanding gemstone proportions and facet dimensions. She has consulted industry experts to learn how to use the correct dimensions and ratios for the stones in her paintings. She often does not see the actual stones—most clients send her photographs. Painting accurate colors can be challenging, she said, because of the way a gemstone’s color changes with movement and light. Mixing color palettes is a laborious process: She will mix 30 or so colors and write down each color recipe for future use. “People think being an artist is painting all day every day, and it’s not,” she said. “It’s numbers and talking to people, and it’s sales and it’s promotion. Even the cleanup and setup takes forever.”
Crabtree has two autoimmune diseases. “There are certain days where I wake up and my hands are just stuck in fists. Sometimes I can’t walk. Sometimes I can’t open my paint,” she said. “But I do what I love, and I get to create my own hours, and I get to travel. So I make it work and stay positive.”
