Amanda Phillips
Amanda originally trained as a painter and then had a career as a chartered architect for many years working on high profile buildings. She taught at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Napier University on various fine art, design and architecture courses for over a decade. She has won awards in both architecture and in painting and was the first tutor to teach in both the School of Design and the School of Fine Art at ECA. She has now returned to painting as a full time occupation focusing on buildings and landscapes in various media.
She often incorporates the use of tartan paper or graph paper in her paintings, as the grid patterns enhance the visual complexity and reflect her architectural background and she loves lines. The tartan paper provides inspired flashes of colour combinations that are familiar to us all.
Industry and engineering are also of great interest and diagrammatical lines and mathematical engineering symbols are incorporated into some paintings.
More recently her work has focused on atmospheres in the landscape and the acoustics which also contribute to memories of an experienced landscape. The aim is not just to capture the visual aspects of the landscape but also the soundtrack. These are expressed in mark making which may at first appear random and abstract, but add to the visual impact and address the acoustics of the landscape.
Working spontaneously she adopts a mixed media approach which includes paint, gesso, charcoal, pastel, printed paper and pencil mark making to create a layered depth of surface.
‘I like to create an experience for the viewer, not a ‘picture’. I make marks to suggest things which they can interpret in their own way. I don’t paint anything literally.
There’s nothing terribly intellectual about what I do, it’s just a conversation in my head with a landscape or building that comes out in paint and mark making rather than poetic words – sometimes that’s a fast process that I can’t get down quick enough, sometimes it’s slower and more contemplative and worked out. Sometimes it’s obscurely abstract, sometimes less so – It’s just what it is on the day really. Its visual poetry I think – painting feelings and observations. The viewer then comes along and attaches their own response and interpretation, just like a poem. That can change as you go through life. I like that, things not staying the same forever, that you see it one way and maybe years later you see it another….that way it’s always fresh. ’
I am totally affected by the seasons and my work at any time of year reflects this – and the music I listen to whilst painting must come in to it somewhere too I think …. Any one piece of work can involve all sorts of painting techniques as a response to whatever it is I am painting, it’s more like a workshop than a painting studio. I love to take risks as it keeps me excited about what I’m doing and hopefully that comes across and excites the viewer too.’
