​AMY SPITZER PAINTINGS

As a child, I lived in my imagination. I fantasized about the world in rain puddles and the one I saw in the reflection of my bedroom mirror. As I grew up, I came to explore my feelings about what I saw and imagined by painting.

 

My initial preference was to explore the creation of three-dimensional space in my work. I have focused on learning and using old master methods of indirect painting and studied 1-point and 2-point perspective although I never used these systems systematically in my painting. In particular, I have studied the work of Rembrandt, Velazquez and Italian painters from Giotto to Caravaggio, and French painters like Delacroix, Chardin, Corot and their individual methods. After some years of trying to replicate them, I began to conduct my own experiments using various media, different brushes and types of rags, and a variety of colors.

 

Concurrently, I have also been a devoted student of Cezanne, Bonnard and Matisse. The forms in their works continued to represent something recognizable from the "real" world, but each  of them, in different ways at distinctive times abstracted space and volume and called attention to the painting’s surface plane. In my paintings, I use a variety of means and methods to conjure a "real" world in a three-dimensional space, and at the same time design a unified, impenetrable surface of flat shapes. In this way my work signifies both a real and created world, a paradox.

 

Life is paradox, peace and struggle, pain and delight, often felt in the same moment—opposites we comprehend not intellectually so much as emotionally and sense as inextricably connected, not one without the other. We live our lives, experience myriad ordinary pleasures and troubles, ups and downs, many times without much reflection on our feelings. When we look at art that is authentic, truthful, we are moved to strong feelings that heighten our awareness of our own lives and life. I produce my real/created world, not only as a place for me to be fully awake and alive, but for others to inhabit in the same way. I want my paintings to be a reminder of all that is suffered and sacrificed and at the same time to be a place of joy and hope, peace and light, a place to feel the whole of life.