Artist in Residence – Spring 2021
What struck me first about her work wasn’t just the color, although expressive and gorgeously layered.
What I noticed first was space. It was the space between the color and the shapes that gave her art such vibrancy. And immediacy. It calls the eye to search for those moments in time between the brush strokes to see the space where art lives. In that space, there is a decidedly unfinished yet complete feel about her work.
Sometimes, Amy Stone, the Seattle-based painter, admits she doesn’t tape or even paint the edges, but that is because the focus is the sensual, feminine lines and firms that fill the canvas. She doesn’t present a full idea to the viewer. She presents a full concept in color and implores you to resolve it. To complete it.
“That’s your job,” Stone says about finding the completion in her art. “Not mine.”
Like many artists, she has been creating her whole life. And like many artists, life tended to get in the way of creation.
She has spent time outside of painting. Yet even those jobs, in advertising and wine sales, she still cultivates a creative lilt to her approach to work and life. She focuses on the big picture, the larger vision, and doesn’t dwell within the lines.
“I was a wine rep,” she concedes. “But the kind that often let the wine key at home. Who shows up at a client’s business with wine but no way to open it?”
Amy does.
Stone relates her work to the idea of Wabi-sabi, “the quintessential Japanese aesthetic,” she tells me. She often approaches a canvas first with a slight brush of color, almost like stretching a hue of linen to make the canvas less white, less stark, and less daunting.
She then sees what the canvas has to say and imitates the things in her life with bold strokes, bright colors, and a decidedly feminine aura that imbues every painting with a visceral beauty to the complexities of everyday life.
The human form is an essential theme in her works, even when the form isn’t always visible. Like a sensual subtext, the warmth of shape, the beauty of feminine curve, is present behind the bold strokes and blocks of color. This inherent femineity gives a gentle comfort and ease to her abstract work. It makes her painting feel human and inviting, in a way that fails many other painters.
“Body image is something many people struggle with, me included,” she confides.
“And as we age, everything continues to shift, literally and figuratively. Incorporating the female form into my work has been a way for me to lean into this complicated, difficult, yet beautiful process.”
Born in New York and educated at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Hofstra University, she moved to Seattle in 2014 and picked up her brushes again. With her husband and two sons, she seeks out the beauty of the quotidian and splashes its color and intricate space to create tableaus of serene imperfections that are simultaneously impermanent and universal.
We spoke over the phone for over an hour, just two strangers exploring and sharing each other’s life stories. It was as easy as sitting across the table with an old friend in Paris, sipping espresso remembering our first walking tour of the Pompidou. We talked about influences and ambitions and the crooked path back to art.
She exudes a genuine quality that is approachable, like an old pair of Vans and a well-worn and paint spotted pair of jeans. Amy Stone is real, humble in her own accomplishments, and approachable. And full of color. And space. Just like her art.
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