“Vessel 2023” by Amy Masters
By Jenny Neal
ANDES — Last Saturday September 13 saw the opening reception for artist Amy Masters’ “Interior Life” at Hawk + Hive gallery in Andes on show until October 19.
This new body of work by Amy is different from her last - last year’s “Family Portraits” at ArtUp was mostly people portrayed outside the home. “Interior Life” is quintessential still life: objects on kitchen tables and in living spaces, but the color palette is similarly luxuriant: creamy grays, lush multifarious greens and soft blues punctuated by splashes of orange, red or yellow. These drops of optimism and enthusiasm, in the form of fruit or flowers, represent Amy’s playful nature. For example, Amy seems to bend the light, wrapping shadows around the subject - and why not? After all, we’re not taking a photograph, you can almost hear the teacher say. One vase is also bent, as if the flowers it carries are just too heavy.
There’s also the texture that’s noticeable. Outlines and patterns are made by scratching the paint, which is thickly applied making the canvases look like a stippled adobe wall. This lends an ever-so-slight 3-D quality to the work up close, when the raised parts create their own shadow.
One of the pieces is brought over from the Family Portraits show, and included in Interior Life: Vessels 2023 that makes one wonder how much of abstraction is a Rorschach test for the viewer. The subject of Vessels 2023 could easily be a large cozy armchair illuminated by a standing lamp next to a pile of books (wishful thinking), but Amy sees the chair as a vase with two strands of foliage.
Talking of her process Amy says: “I guess I would say that composition comes first. I place objects on the picture plane first and they need to sit comfortably for my eye. If they don’t, I move them around and I take away, and add to. That’s the first thing. I love color and so I’m constantly playing with relationships of color. I run through different palettes at different times. All of those paintings have a very similar palette and part of that is - you want the body of work to hold together. As a body of work that is hanging in a gallery, you want them to all talk to each other and to relate”.
Amy says that this new work is a lot more “realized and developed than earlier work for sure”. To begin, she uses oil sticks and sketches an outline of her subject, then scrapes off some of the oil stick and then continues painting with tube oils. “It’s nice because [the sticks] kind of limit me at first and then I can keep the palette simplified. Then I go over that, and layer it, and work on the surface. These paintings have a lot of surface work and that was what was fun about them. There’s a lot of scratching away and layering on top, and scratching away again”.
Traces of earlier scratchings and outlines remain in the work, lending some of the subjects a ghostly air, which adds to their depth and mystery. Much of the work was conceived during a long trip to France (Paris) in Spring, a place where Amy studied for a semester (Provence) as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence. “Being immersed in an entirely new context allowed for exploration within a new palette while creating vignettes that simultaneously felt familiar and foreign and were ultimately inspiring”.
As for influences, Amy cites Georgio Morandi, Pierre Bonnard, Richard Diebenkorn and Jane Freilicher as touchstones.
There was much joy at the opening reception in this airy, light-filled gallery, with its warm and breezy, autumnal atmosphere on the back porch - and joy is what these paintings inspire in the viewer. Says Jayne Parker, owner of Hawk + Hive: “Collaborating with Amy on this exhibition has been a real privilege. Her still lifes reflect both sensitivity and discipline, and it has been a pleasure to see the work come together in our gallery”.
Amy Masters lives and works in Arkville, where she maintains her studio. A painter, printmaker, and teacher, she draws inspiration from her immediate surroundings - both inside the home and in the landscapes beyond. She has exhibited widely in NYC, Los Angeles, Maine and through upstate New York. Masters is a founding member of ADHOC Projects and has been an artist-in-residence and board member of the Heliker-Lahotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island, Maine.
In 2021, she co-founded the 1053 Main Street Gallery in Fleischmanns, serving as its director and curator until 2023.
Interior Life by Amy Masters runs from September 13 - October 19 at Hawk + Hive Gallery, 61 Main Street, Andes. Instagram: @hawkandhive www.hawkandhive.com/amymasters www.amymasters.com
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