Amandah Louise

Amandah Louise – An Australian artist, working primarily with acrylic and charcoal to paint and to draw scapes and characters of the Coorong.

Born in South Australia, I recently returned home to live and to work in the iconic Coorong, an exquisite and culturally rich and complex location. Here, you can’t help but be inspired.

I was 19 years old when I happened on a Leon Pericles exhibition. It was in Perth, and right then and there I decided that I wanted to paint pictures. But, like many of us I got distracted. Bar jobs and retail employ, boys and babies later, at 28 I had another chance at it,  a Bachelor of visual communication from Deakin University, then what followed were years, agonizing years, me pursuing a visual language that I could call my own, trying to create something original, something that the world had never seen. I wanted to be the female version of Brett Whiteley! Who didn’t! Of course, what we see and read and encounter informs our process, and I literally ran through the Louvre when I had the opportunity to visit, devoured art magazines…. So much looking, so much obsessing….

 Today I’m simply delighted to just turn up at the easel and to create. I don’t feel the need to be original anymore and that has set me free. I guess that maturity grants us some wisdom.  “There is nothing new under the sun” fits for me, for now.

Today, I’m immersing myself in this place and enjoying the work that is emerging. Because I spent more than 15 years as a remedial massage therapist, it is almost impossible to not see figures in my work, characters from stories, both past and present, but too, the landscape here is impressing upon me.

 Currently dividing my time between freelance painting, graphic illustration and landscape gardening, I’m increasingly enjoying the tension of allowing Abstract figuration and surrealism to push through the narrative type landscapes that are the focus. For now, it has to be about the stories.