Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Noble
Hi Amanda, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I spent my formative years in Japan, moving there as a toddler. That experience really influenced my artistic style. The use of origami imagery in my work was inspired by my early childhood living in rural Japan. I’ve always had a passion for drawing and painting since I could hold a crayon. My mother, is also an artist so I was very fortunate to grow up in a home that had a lot of art supplies available to me to use and a space to be creative. I attended Pratt MWP with a scholarship and after my foundation year of art school, I took some time off and did an independent study abroad. Seeing the European masterpieces in person was not only educational but so inspiring. I learned a great deal about painting from that experience. I finished by BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, College of Art and Design and have been painting full time ever since.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I feel like with any creative pursuit, it is not always a smooth road. There’s a lot of ups and downs when you’re really trying to find yourself in your work. It takes time to develop as an artist and to find your path and no two paths look the same. When I was first starting to paint, I was very nervous about making mistakes and was too hard on myself when things didn’t look the way I expected. It took many years to find my voice in my work and I still feel like I am always going to be developing that voice as I grow as an artist.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My work is about how we perceive ourselves through the lens of technology and social media using large scale oil paintings. I specialize in painting figures, mostly women, and incorporating paper origami in the paintings; flowers, butterflies, and frogs. To me paper symbolizes artificiality, fragility, and it ties back to my childhood in Japan where I learned how to fold origami. Some of the figures I’ve painted have very decorative and elaborate nail designs. Our fingertips are how we connect with others and the style of nail can symbolize different feelings about that connection. Flowers can be very feminine and alluring while the spike nails can be very cautious and dangerous. I also love the imagery of eyes; reflections in them, covering them, or distorting them through glass. Our perspective is so important and I find our phones, this glass screen, to be a distortion of reality.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
It’s easy to look back and think of all the things you wish you knew sooner but I feel like any artistic practice is such a personal experience. So my advice to someone starting out would be to really do some self exploration to find what makes your experiences unique and combine that with what you enjoy doin the most. For me I always drew girls since I was really little, so specializing in figure painting made the most sense for my authentic self. Art wouldn’t be art without your personal perspective so being vulnerable and sharing your human experience I think is really special.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.amandanobleart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amanda.noble.art
