Amanda Blunden
Biography / Artist statement
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 companies including Manchester City Art Gallery and Jane Shouls Design; paper-mache furniture and grandfather clocks; and painting. Her work has been featured in leading Interior magazines, Sunday supplements and on TV.
Amanda has also exhibited in London, both in solo shows, art fairs and through local group shows in galleries. Most recently she has exhibited her paintings at the RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition at Bankside Gallery, London (2018, 2019 and 2020) and where her monoprint, ‘Night Pool’ also won the Intaglio Printmaker’s Prize at the National Original Print Competition in 2017. Two paintings have been accepted by The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour for their 208th Exhibition at the Mall Galleries to be shown in September 2020.
“My process is very much one of call and response: stripping away and adding; reacting to colours and forms, marks and values until I feel I have evoked the mood I'm striving for. I like to work in a variety of media – acrylics, gesso, charcoal, collage, oil pastels - on canvas, paper and wooden panels.
Memory, mood, light and space are the driving forces that guide me and the intangible qualities they offer. 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”.