Amanda Blake
Contemporary Artist, Lecturer in Painting at Carmarthen School of Art and Workshop Tutor.
Working with fresco and ancient traditional mediums to explore how materiality and process in painting can contribute to thinking around Nature, our relationship with our environment and issues surrounding sustainability, value and care.
I work with solely natural raw materials and pigments as a conscious choice that has evolved through a practice in buon fresco, and a thinking that stems from its limestone base, its ancient palette and the preciousness of earth.
early exploration of fresco’s tactile and luminous qualities led to an interest in the perceptual in painting, and in particular how certain tensions between physical and illusory space can ellicit a sense of ‘presentness’ in looking, and an experiential and deeply contemplative space.
the slow nature of building up painting grounds, of finding, grinding and preparing pigments, and polishing surfaces by hand allowed a deep intimacy with materials to develop, and through it, a natural thinking on the materials themselves. Their direct relation to the land, and the questions that arise, on what we use, where it comes from, what impact it has, and whether we can do things differently.
My work is minimal in nature, and this feels more and more necessary, not only for using less, but for a simple ‘letting be’ of what is, and the noticing that occurs.
- stone, earth, pigment, charcoal, chalk, wax, gold leaf, or the juxtaposition of local and found sands and pigments alongside the traditional or precious - paring down the components of early painting and drawing mediums to allow them to touch, sometimes conceptually, in what is revealed through process, and sometimes spatially, through a particular balance of surface and depth, tactility and light, and sometimes through both
for a pause in the present moment, for noticing, and for a thinking that follows, where associations or questions can arise around sustainability, value and care.
Amanda Blake, 2022
early exploration of fresco’s tactile and luminous qualities led to an interest in the perceptual in painting, and in particular how certain tensions between physical and illusory space can ellicit a sense of ‘presentness’ in looking, and an experiential and deeply contemplative space.
the slow nature of building up painting grounds, of finding, grinding and preparing pigments, and polishing surfaces by hand allowed a deep intimacy with materials to develop, and through it, a natural thinking on the materials themselves. Their direct relation to the land, and the questions that arise, on what we use, where it comes from, what impact it has, and whether we can do things differently.
My work is minimal in nature, and this feels more and more necessary, not only for using less, but for a simple ‘letting be’ of what is, and the noticing that occurs.
- stone, earth, pigment, charcoal, chalk, wax, gold leaf, or the juxtaposition of local and found sands and pigments alongside the traditional or precious - paring down the components of early painting and drawing mediums to allow them to touch, sometimes conceptually, in what is revealed through process, and sometimes spatially, through a particular balance of surface and depth, tactility and light, and sometimes through both
for a pause in the present moment, for noticing, and for a thinking that follows, where associations or questions can arise around sustainability, value and care.
Amanda Blake, 2022