Artist Bio
Amanda Hanlon is a painter and printmaker. She lives and works out of her home located in a historic river town in Minnesota.
Amanda has received a MFA in Painting from the University of Washington - Seattle, a BFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She has taught classes in Painting, Drawing and Printmaking in Savannah, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Minnesota, California, Georgia, Washington and Wisconsin.
Her paintings, prints and digital paintings were recently featured in the show "Shape, Space, Structure" at ArtReach St. Croix in Stillwater, MN. Her painting “Dining Room in Winter'' won the Best of Show award at the Robbin Gallery Juried Exhibition in Robbinsdale, Minnesota.
Having lived, worked and visited many cities and states in her adult life, a sense of place and home has become an endless source of inspiration for Amanda.
Artist Statement
I am a painter and printmaker who explores concepts of change in my work. I create angular, colorful compositions that experiment with light, shape, transparency, and repetition. My subject matters are interior spaces, landscapes, and still lifes of paper boxes.
Rather than documenting a single moment in time, my work captures the layers that exist when recalling a memory, experiencing a place after having not visited for decades, or reading a page from a childhood journal. Rarely, would a single image come to mind in these instances, but rather a layered experience of emotions, curiosity and storytelling.
The evolution of a piece from start to finish is important in my work. Since each piece holds a conversation with the next piece created, I like to couple later work with early experiments and studies. I also play with surface and texture to reveal earlier choices and marks. I will sand down the surfaces of my paintings in between layers of paint as a way to reveal the history of the composition as it was developed. I will also re-work the drawing of my subject matter and will maintain elements of the old marks in the finished piece to act as record keeping.
I create my work in a series - either by repeating a composition in different mediums or by creating a body of work of a single subject depicted from multiple vantage points. These acts of repetition allow for both a deeper familiarity with the subject matter and creates a natural distance from when I first experienced it.
