Today we’d like to introduce you to Amelia Layton.
Amelia, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was born in Seattle Washington and grew up north of the city. I attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking, My work from that time was a bit all over the place and still hugely representational, trying to find my voice as one does in college. There was always a philosophical question in the work but I didn’t know enough to even understand it.
I chose to attend the San Francisco Art Institute for my MFA because my aunt was battling lung cancer in Santa Cruz and I wanted to be closer to her. She passed away the day I registered for classes. I can’t express how this changed me as an artist but the experience of hospice care for the last week of her life changed my perspective in a real and lasting way. My work had always about anxiety and loss then transitioned to pure abstraction. I tried to eliminate all figurative images in the work and restricted myself to a black and grey color pallet.
I met my husband while in grad school, he was on tour in a band with friends of mine from the North West. Eventually I moved back to Seattle to be with him. I kept making art but it becomes much harder when you don’t have a studio to work in. My work became smaller and more portable, paper and watercolor with obsessive line work. We moved to LA so he could go to school and lived there for three years. I taught those horrid Wine and Canvas classes during that time and continued to make small works in our tiny studio apartment in MacArthur Park.
I continued to show my work in Seattle and the Bay Area, it was very hard to get a food in the art scene in LA because I was always working when openings were happening. My work started to become more sculpture and I was trying to push the boundaries of what I thought paint could/should be. This was the start of my current body of work.
We moved back to the Northwest to be closer to family and friends. Also because we realized we aren’t LA people as much as we wanted to be. I now work as the Public Programs Manager at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington. Still making art out of my apartment.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I make paintings, right now they are sculptural and I mold them rather than use a brush. Its a fine balance between trying to control the liquid paint and letting things fall apart. I find that when I let things fall apart the best paintings are made. The work takes time, each layer needs a few days to dry. In that time I will walk by a piece hundreds of times, letting it sink into me so when it is ready I just know what to do next.
These paintings are inspired by memories, often of people or places, but mostly they are inspired by the way a memory makes you feel. They have a body to them. Recently a friend said he wanted to bite one, and another person had a strong desire to lick another. They sit in contrast to the work I do on paper. Work that is obsessive and controlled hundreds of tiny lines made with a fine brush that take all my concentration and hours upon hours of work.
The work on paper helps me during anxiety or panic while these sculptural paintings force me to let go. I cannot control them in the same way, I cannot control what the paint does as it dries, if or how it cracks, if the paint is old it might take ages to dry or never dry at all. The work is asking for time, whatever the viewer might get from that is okay with me.
What do you think it takes to be successful as an artist?
It’s very hard to keep making art when the things that “should” be happening aren’t. I didn’t get gallery representation right out of grad school and I’m not going to all the art fairs. I don’t think that was ever going to be my path, I’m too shy to make those connections and put myself out there.
I’d rather just keep making the work, one day that will be enough. Its essential for an artist to keep questioning the work they are making I had a professor who said you always have to ask yourself “Who for? What for?” when you don’t like or can’t answer those questions then you probably need to rethink your practice.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I don’t have anything set in stone right now, but I am working on some shows in the next year.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.amelialayton.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: callmeamelia
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