Amanda Ansell is Contemporary British Painting’s Artist of the Month. Artists are selected and interviewed by fellow CBP artist Paul Newman.
The interview:
CBP/Paul Newman: Looking at these small, square, and perfectly formed abstract paintings they give the impression of a painted equivalent to an aspect of a natural environment; a cropped close up of looking through or moving through wet reeds or grass, close to the ground. I think you can get a sense of this even without reading about the context of your work. Can you discuss something about the connection between sources of inspiration and the work’s autonomy as abstract painting?
Amanda Ansell: For sure, there’s a correlation between the rural and the expansive. My studio is on the water’s edge between Suffolk and Essex, so I have a constantly changing watery environment all around me. There’s a stimulating connection between my immersion in the landscape and a desire to paint abstract works. This pairing is based on continually recurring themes such as nature’s seasons, circular forms, and swirling motion. The sensations of being in this landscape, combined with an eye for curved formations are translated into abstract notations that are multi-layered reworkings of paint and the painted surface. In fact, I first started making abstract works based on an immersive experience of being in the water and the interaction between two or three movements twenty years ago, so my practice has gone full circle.
CBP: The notion of being close to the ground is a feeling I have from your work. And this can be linked to painters like Michael Porter and Graham Sutherland’s landscape work. Is this a significant aspect to you, in terms of observing, experiencing, and re-imagining through your painting?
AA: Very true, I do a lot of walking and there can be a synesthetic encounter when wandering through the long grasses of nearby meadowland. I’ve been roaming the sides of the riverbank since I was small and recognize that I’ve developed an appetite to be enveloped by the watery landscape. It isn’t simply a case of travelling from point a to point b but having my feet on the ground, near to the water, and feeling held by this space. I love how British landscape painters like Michael Porter and Graham Sutherland drift between abstraction and landscape, generating paintings that have encountered the flow of nature. To me, they suggest we get a little closer, to allow the effects to permeate our sensibilities.
CBP: Light feels like a key aspect to the work, reflected on the surface and coming through from the layers beneath. It connects to the notion of transparencies and building and revealing of layers in a painting. Could you discuss this and how you interpret and evoke light in your paintings?
AA: Yes, I am very conscious that I strive for that glowing energy; a radiance coming through from the underpainting, a delicate touch, and soft gesture, the effortless union of painted layers, where I achieve that brief sensation of all components merging without burden. It is sunlight, changing light, the quality of light, it’s certainly something precious. It’s also about the artist’s loss of self when engaged in the act of painting. I enjoy working with transparent colours and in particular the hues of yellow and brown. The quality of transparency and light is a natural progression of ideas in terms of addressing the landscape, starting with the earthy browns and moving through to the luminous greens and on to silvery whites.
CBP: The colour green feels like a very logical choice for these works, it’s incredibly rich and evocative. I remember visiting a Cy Twombly retrospective at Tate and though he wasn’t my favourite painter or exhibition at the time, I was unexpectedly enchanted by a later series of deep green paintings in the show that seemed clearly inspired by riverside landscapes and Monet. Could you discuss the use of colour in this body of work, perhaps in relation to how you used colour in the previous series of work?
AA: Totally agree – Cy Twombly’s large, cascading green paintings are persuasive. I think it was Monet or Cezanne who commented “colour is an assistant” because when you are in nature you can simply reference the chromaticity around you. I moved to using analogous colours from purple-blue through to green and yellow when I started connecting to and referencing landscape in my work. Before this, I was making a series of foam bubble islands in abstracted seascapes and they employed a monochrome, greyscale. These paintings are rooted in notions of impermanence and coincided with a decision to move from London to Suffolk.
CBP: These small-scale works have complete self-contained compositions, yet are also like cropped fragments that also suggest the world beyond these picture frames. I’m not sure if it can be directly compared to photography, but could you discuss cropping and the sense of scale you explore in these works?
AA: Yes, the cropping of curved lines and gestural motifs is part of a repetitive routine that becomes a self-perpetuating method for making abstract paintings. I began producing line drawings that recorded the movement of water, and I wasn’t sure what would become of these doodles. I noticed how the lines fitted together and then thought about how I could use them in a process of layering liquid paint on the canvas. I repeated the technique, took note of the organic patterns and the empty spaces in between the curves. Sometimes I’d crop these formations and look for small, self-similar arrangements within. Scale is instinctive and balances with the size of the canvas.
The full interview can be read on the Contemporary British Painting website here
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