Amanda Jackson
Amanda Jackson is a painter based in Hadleigh, Essex, who works from a studio at Hadleigh Old Fire Station Studios and has lived beside the Thames Estuary all her life.
After working in London and raising a family she took a BA in Painting at the University for the Creative Arts, and later completed the year-long mentoring programme at Newlyn School of Art. She works in acrylic and oil on canvas.
She is a member of SEVEN, an artist book collective of seven women artists working with artist books, altered books and sketchbooks, and she is one of the eight artists of Two Tree Gallery, the artist-led cooperative in Leigh-on-Sea.
Artist Statement
I am an abstract landscape painter exploiting the qualities of paint to re-imagine a dreamy contemplative space on the canvas.
Much of my work has its inception in the evocative edgelands of the Essex marshes and Thames Estuary; places that have their own beauty, but not in a conventional way. This habitat is one that is re-creating itself from the remnants of an industrial past; landfill and brownfield sites are slowly being consumed by nature, leaving only traces of a manmade history. The marshland is often overlooked, there is a stillness to these environments, an atmosphere, mood, quality of light that suits my love of solitude.
I find the blurring of boundaries between land and water visually stimulating, and want to explore these qualities in my paintings. The flow of the watery, sometimes muddy terrain finds a direct correlation in the way I use paint. All of this rich food for creativity is taken back to the studio where I explore the materiality of paint through the manipulation of liquid pools of acrylic and oil paint.
I exploit happy accidents, allowing forms to coalesce on the canvas, continents of paint push and pull as I traverse that line between the real and the imagined, controlling the paint and letting it flow! My mind is allowed to drift and dream as the painting takes me on the journey to a different landscape of my own making; a dreamy tranquil space on the canvas.