ARTISTS OF FROME AMANDA BEE
“I’d love at some point to explore printmaking further – mono-printing is something I really love.”
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We talk to Amanda about her love of Cornwall and how it deeply inspires her work, her near miss as an animal hoarder and how she is the only person to come out of lockdown with a positive experience of Zoom. What is your artistic background? I completed a Foundation at Lincoln College of Art which allows you to experience different disciplines and then a Degree in Art and Social Context at UWE Bristol. By this point, after focussing on print-making at Lincoln, I had decided to explore oil painting. What made you follow this path? As a kid I was always drawing and painting. I remember saying when I was about five that I wanted to be an artist. I can’t remember wanting any other career. What is your physical creative process? What materials and techniques do you use? I’m a mixed media landscape painter so my main materials are acrylics, water soluble crayons and pencils, oil bars and pastels. I work on paper, canvas and primed boards. I love using collage and hand paint or print my own papers.
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THE LIST FROME
Artists of Frome
What inspires your work? I’m inspired by landscape and seascapes. My work is abstracted but is always taken from the landscape. I work from my own drawings which I make in sketchbooks. I’m interested in places that have personal meaning and hold memories. Revisiting or knowing an area well brings in deeper levels of emotion and connection. How did lockdown affect the way you work and create? Lockdown slowed everything down. I teach classes to adults, so after a while I caved in and took to Zoom. It has been a lot of fun and I think my students feel it has been a great success. As for my art, I had to really look around me close to home to find a new source of inspiration, which turned out to be Rodden Fields, farm and Church. It gave me an opportunity to focus and explore in depth one area of Frome and I have really enjoyed it. Where do you work from? Tell us about your studio. I work from a studio in the Silk Mill in Frome. My studio is light, quite a good size and warm in the winter! I have all my art materials there as well as a clean area for admin work and Zoom of course.
