With an end in mind - oil on linenI love her early works and her quest for new expressive ideas.
I admire her willingness to help - her posts on Art Forum and Australian Art Forum are always informative and very helpful.
"My postgraduate was at the Victorian College of the Arts and my undergraduate was at Chisholm Institute (now Monash University) in Melbourne.
I started by creating very abstract landscapes. You could tell they were landscapes but they were not intended to be very accurate representations. I was painting the idea of a landscape. I also played with other things, but I would say that I have always been heavily based in figurative work.
Everything has evolved over time. If I look at the work I have created over the last seven years there has been an apparent evolution of the ideas. What I am doing now is very different from what I was doing seven years ago. There has been a natural progression from one piece of work or from one theme to another. I am currently painting children playing in the sky. That evolved from painting people snorkeling in the sky, which was one of those happy accidents. I just happened to put a photograph of myself snorkeling, while I was on holiday, next to a photograph of one of my drawings and the idea just somehow came to me. It was the first time that I actually worked with figures. I liked that idea and I began playing with the notion of limitless possibilities of being in the sky".
Amanda van Gils - Art Interview - 006
Enjoy Amanda's figurative work and more recent landscapes here:
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