She Fell in Love With a Boat Captain and Moved to the Galapagos
The Angelique Art Gallery stands out along the main strip of Pelican Bay on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galapagos archipelago.
First of all, the exterior of the gallery and shop is royal blue in a sea of pastel- painted tourist shops. It’s also the rare retailer here not selling tortoise trinkets and T-shirts with ripostes on natural selection and euphemisms for the female anatomy inspired by the native blue-footed booby birds.
The next surprise comes from Sarah Darling, the owner and artist in residence. She greeted me with a chipper, lilting accent as she painted a pattern of dolphins on a scarf, dipping her fine-tipped brush in an empty tin of cat food filled with blue paint.
In 1989, Darling was a 31-year-old artist. The daughter of a general, she had grown up in the Cotswolds in England and was also educated in Italy, and she was now living and working in London, where she painted landscapes of the Galapagos islands.
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Darling had never actually visited the islands. She painted from photographs. Demand grew so high that a gallery asked her to travel to the remote archipelago off the coast of Ecuador to prepare for a high-profile exhibition. She stayed for five weeks, the length of time Charles Darwin spent there during his famous expedition, which would eventually change the course of human history. The visit changed the course of Darling’s personal history, when some friends, fellow Brits, invited her out on a boat for a day trip around the island.
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The captain of the boat was a Galapagos native, Franklin Angermeyer, a captain and a boat builder. Sparks flew, but Darling had to return to London for her show. Angermeyer was persistent. He invited her to fly back from London to join him in the Caribbean, where he was picking up a new boat.
She went. The pair traveled on that boat throughout the Caribbean, along the coasts of Panama and Ecuador and finally on the 650 miles from the South American continent to the Galapagos, where they were married. Angermeyer sold that boat, they built their dream house, and Darling realized her dream of opening her own art gallery.
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She named it the Angelique, after the boat that brought her to the Galapagos for the very first time.
Inside the gallery, Darling sells necklaces made of sterling silver, gold, lapis lazuli, turquoise, spondylus, blue quartz, black pearl, and mother-of-pearl. She calls her oil paintings a “universal cry for hope” that capture the innocence of the Galapagos Islands. One painting includes her pet dog dressed as a pirate.
In the Galapagos, Darling lives both of her passions, painting and rescuing animals with the local Darwin Animal Doctors, an organization that provides veterinary care on the islands. Angermeyer still builds boats.
“I have a beautiful home here where I paint and a sanctuary in the back for rescue cats,” Darling said as she showed me around her gallery, happily flicking her strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder. “Living here keeps you young.”
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