ARTIST STATEMENT

“Quantum physics tells us that nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer. That statement, from science, holds an enormous and powerful insight. It means that everyone sees a different truth, because everyone is creating what they see.” - Neale Donald Walsch
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I’ve always been grateful for writers and musicians who can put into words things that I cannot. That’s how abstract painting began for me. When I was younger, I was trying to say something, but back then my vocabulary was limited. Those limitations translated to my paintings. I didn’t have the maturity and wasn’t able to pull from deep enough within myself to really let go.

 

I often find it difficult to talk about my work, especially in person. To be honest, I'm inspired by nothing, and everything. I am thinking and connecting more than I have in years. It's been a beautiful evolution. Much of my work relates to the Japanese term Wabi-Sabi; a state of acceptance of the imperfections in flow, and the acceptance of the cycle of life and death. I have long suffered from anxiety. Pushing paint around and getting lost in the creative process has been my therapy, and color something that can bring me peace. My hope is that my viewers feel the same sense of safety from my work that I do. My abstracted figurative work alludes to this beauty in imperfection. Body image is something many people struggle with, me included, 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.

 

So many of us speak about finding balance in life, but I find it’s more of a give and take, like a seesaw. I strive to create a balance of movement, texture, color and energy in my paintings, my work is always just a little off kilter and off center, alluding to the notion that balance may be something we can never really achieve. Or maybe we find it, but it’s not what we were expecting it to look like.

 

My paintings are not perfect. There are unintentional drips and marks. I do not tape my edges and often don't paint my edges. I like things to be natural and real because that is life.

 

I have been told that my work is unresolved and unfinished. To that I say, thank you. It’s your job to resolve it, not mine. My work is never meant to be “perfect” or “done”, and neither am I.

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BIOGRAPHY

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Amy Stone was born and raised in the suburbs of New York City. She has a BA in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, and a Masters in Art Education from Hofstra University. Since relocating to Seattle in 2014 with her family, she has shifted her medium to painting with a focus on abstract expressionism and abstract women. A mom of two young boys, she draws inspiration from even the most mundane tasks in her daily life. Stone says that her work relates her work to the idea of Wabi-sabi; the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. A beauty of things unconventional. This is often how her paintings are described.