Amanda Collis's Page

Website

http://www.etsy.com/shop/Mossmottle

Relationship status

in a relationship

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Digital, Drawing, Painting

I am...

curious giallo

About my artwork

A keen painter and metal clay jewellery maker, I'm a self-representing artist currently living in Derbyshire, on the edge of the Peak District of the United Kingdom.
My work tends to be richly textural and tonally variegated, reflecting the limestone and woodland environment I inhabit.
My interest in organic forms and textures is reflected in my painting, most of which falls somewhere between imaginary or remembered landscape and abstraction - although I am often ambivalent about using the term "abstract" - (Taoist art interests me as much as 20th Century abstraction, automatism, Expressionism or Dada/Surrealism).
I paint using a variety of knife, brush, direct hands-on, glazing, impasto or sgraffito techniques often in a layered process to achieve richness and depth. Frequently landscape will assert itelf before long. Working on the larger more elaborate paintings gradually over time, just as moss and lichens are left to grow over stone perhaps helps to trick myself into believing that an image is forming of its own accord! Yet works built up in layers this way also often contains spontaneous, gestural drawing and calligraphic expression. It's very important to me to have a strong element of improvisation and spontaneity in the creative process.
Art is a record of feeling, yet rather than being purely a matter of human emotion, my work is the result too of responding to visual perceptions, memory, sensory experience, intuitive impulses and mythical, archetypal or otherwise resonant imagery.
I find oil painting endlessly fascinating, regarding it variously as monstrous wrestling partner, garden of sensual delight, meditative focus and a branch of alchemy.
Influences from music ( I often paint listening to music) and film (if more obliquely, in terms of ideas, moods, locales, atmospheres and situations) inform my work as much as the work of other painters.
I'm also committed to making affordable, smaller format original fine art works. I love the sense of intimacy often to be found in such art. I want my paintings to be living with someone in their home rather than left exposed and shivering in some public space. Or indeed languishing against my studio wall :-)

In metal jewellery design, I'm very much inspired by mid-20th Century Modernism, in particular the work of certain Scandinavian and American artists.







Thanks!


- Amanda Collis

http://www.amandacollis.com/
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5276477
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mossmottle/
http://rhubarbia.blogspot.com/

Artists I like

Tove Jansson, Corot, Turner, Van Eyck, Matisse, Kandinsky, Goya, Rembrandt, Max Ernst, Hieronymous Bosch, Brueghel, Balthus, Chagall, Aranyshev, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Menzel, Pentii Sarpaneva, Toyen, COBRA group, Paul Nash, Piero della Francesca, Poussin, Piero di Cosimo, Charles Burchfield, Harry Clarke, William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Thomas Cole, John Martin, Mervyn Peake, Richard Pousette-Dart, Per Kirkeby, Phyllis Trout, Castiglione, Emilio Merlina,

Interests

music, film, literature, nature, Mid 20th Century Modernism, Modernist/ artisan metal jewellery, masks, automata, 1960s culture, ancient art, mythology, alchemy

Centre of the artworld:

nowhere and everywhere