Amanda Clegg

Born in Burnley, Lancashire in 1968. Based in Cardiff. My ambition is to live in a castle and keep chickens and goats.

From a young age I was always drawing or making things. I would draw on anything – the white card that came folded up in my grandad’s shirts, the oval bit you took out of a tissue box to reveal the tissues, cardboard toilet roll inserts; I created whole families out of them! So I imagined I would eventually study Fine Art.

Art was of course my favourite subject in school. It was on a school trip to the National Art Gallery in London aged 12 that my obsession for 16th and 17th Century portraiture began. I stood transfixed in front of Jan van Eyck’s ‘Man in a Red Turban’ and fell in love. Not so much with the intriguing, enigmatic looking man staring out at me, but with the mesmerising quality of the style. It still remains one of my favourite paintings to this day.

The human face mesmerises me and I’ll catch myself staring at people’s faces when they are talking to me. I become distracted by how the light is catching their philtrum or the reflection in their iris or how the pigment of the skin changes when it gets thinner around the eye. I hope I don’t make people too uncomfortable when I do this… I’m listening ...

I did an art foundation course at Nelson & Colne College, Lancashire to discover which art subject was for me. Strangely, this turned out to be Theatre. So at age 18, after being seduced by ‘the boards’, I moved from Lancashire to Cardiff to study Theatre Design for 3 years at The Welsh College of Music and Drama.

After graduating, I worked as a prop-maker and scenic artist for 10 years. I spent the first few thrilling years working for Talismen, a prop-making studio in a backstreet in Cardiff, then a precarious few years freelancing. But I returned to art after the antisocial hours and harsh chemicals became too much. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to not smell of latex, paint and acetone, or always have polystyrene, glue, expanding foam (horrible stuff!) and plaster stuck to my hair and clothes. Not to mention the endless broken nails!

After leaving Talismen, I honed my oil skills (preferring wood panel to canvass) by painting Tudor and Flemish style portraits, Holbein being my number one obsession. I combined my love of art history and Theatrical prop-making background to produce work which I suppose could be described Ancestral portrait meets Historical film prop. I like to think they wouldn’t look out of place in a h...