Amanda Blunden is a British artist living in South West London where she has her studio. She has a BA Hons degree in Fine Art where she studied at Leeds Polytechnic and her artistic career has included murals; surface pattern design for fashion design and galleries including Manchester City Art Gallery; paper-mache furniture and grandfather clocks; and painting. Her work has been featured in leading interior lifestyle magazines, Sunday supplements and on TV. Amanda is represented by Hicks Gallery in London, Murus Art and The Art Buyer in Surrey. She has exhibited her paintings at the RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition at Bankside Gallery, London (2018, 2019 and 2020) where her monoprint, ‘Night Pool’ also won the Intaglio Printmaker’s Prize at the National Original Print Competition in 2017. Two paintings were accepted by The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour for their 208th Exhibition at the Mall Galleries shown in September 2020. “I feel that my paintings have evolved from the heavily textured and architectural paintings of art school days and years of constructing furniture and clocks from papier-mache to their current form - softer, emotive and ethereal in nature. I strive for space but also tension in these emotional landscapes which are either based on memory or imaginings. I look for contrasts in everything and believe it’s the balance of those differences that help a painting breathe its own life and connect emotionally with the viewer. Often those elements are centered around my own experience of places I have visited and the lasting impact they have had on me, either visually or emotionally, sometimes both. I find beauty in a shoreline as much as a bridge or a concrete tower on the side of the motorway. I am always 'chasing the sublime' in my own way - trying to create impact on the senses where words won’t do’.”