Amanda Graves

In The Painter of Modern Life Charles Baudelaire highlights how important it is to experience and bare witness to the contemporary urban environment.

A starting point for my painting is research into a physical awareness, exploration and interaction with the city. Photography, drawing and collected found images are part of this process. The resulting paintings are developed in layers through a language that, whilst referencing iconography, contains a degree of abstraction.

My subject matter includes architecture, graffiti, urban decay, human traces, signage and typography. It underlines a constant yet ambiguous interaction between figuration, narrative and abstraction. The shift in focus, showing the interplay between image and the painterly languages of pictorial construction, offer different levels of intimacy and reflection.

Cambridge School of Art, Cambridge, GB,