Hi everyone. Welcome! I’m here to write a short introductory post to say hello, and express my deepest gratitude for stopping by to see what I’ve been working on.
My name is Amy, and I’m a painter who has lived in the Lehigh Valley area for most of my life. I have two art degrees – my BA in Studio Art from Cedar Crest College and my AA in Fine Art from Northampton Community College. For about three years now, my home studio has been based in Bethlehem, PA.
I have experience working with quite a few materials, from film photography, to ceramics, to painting, and everything in between. When I was a student at NCC, I took as many classes as I could fit in my schedule to satisfy my many interests. As my education progressed, I gained a special interest in painting. For the past several years, my focus has been oil painting, and the natural world became my subject.
Anything and everything in the natural world can be subject matter for my paintings. I was raised to love being in the outdoors, and I have always been drawn to small details and minutiae since I was very young. Trees, bark, leaves, flowers, rocks, root systems, soil – all of it is fascinating to me. I like to take images from nature and manipulate them, zooming in to small details, or emphasizing lines, shapes, colors, and textures to create abstractions. Process is also a very important element. I love the feeling of pushing oil paint around, or the scratch of charcoal on paper, and many of the other tactile qualities of art-making. This emphasis on process has manifested in making my own paint using naturally harvested pigment from rocks – something I will speak more about in a later blog post. For now, you can read my artist statement here.
Creating a website to document my work has been at the back of my mind for a couple years now. I always wanted the purpose of the website to be showcasing finished paintings, but that has never really meshed with the way I actually make my artwork. Since my artwork is so heavy on the process and less on the product, I tend to work at a slower pace. So I decided it makes more sense to include a blog, like this one. To show everyone photos of paintings in progress, show pictures of new paint colors I’m making, share source imagery photos, and just talk a bit about what I’m thinking about lately in reference to my artwork. The goal is to show that even though I don’t work as quickly and steadily as some artists, I am always working on a painting, and always thinking about my paintings.
Once again, thank you so much for stopping by, and for taking the time to read my intro. Please feel free to like, or (even better) leave a comment in the section below for anything you want to know about me, about my painting process, or anything you’d like to see on this blog in the future.
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