Amadea Bailey is an American artist whose early life was full of travel and adventure. She was born in Germany and as a child lived in Switzerland, Colorado and Kenya, East Africa. Though the experience of all of these places has touched her, it is Africa which has remained in her spirit and shaped her senses. The wondrous expanses of space, intricate texture, and saturated light which she encountered there continue to fundamentally inform her entire artistic enterprise. Her move to Los Angeles in 1990 came from a deep yearning for a renewed proximity to the elements, the ocean horizon, and the desert.
Educated at Yale University and the New York Studio School (most noted for its association with Hans Hoffman), her earliest academic exposure to fine art was grounded in analytical discipline and planar analysis, securely rooted in figurative study.
Her mature work attempts, among other things, to fluidly meld the epic sense of drama instilled in her in Africa, with the precision, physicality and compositional structure of her training.
Painting for her is an intensely physical process. She does not begin a painting with an agenda, but finds direction through the act itself. Each painting is a unique journey that unravels and reveals itself as she goes along. Fascinated by the sensuality of the paint,
Amadea builds up the surface using a variety of techniques. Texture is an important element in each painting. She often uses thin washes of paint built up slowly over time. This layering creates a sense of depth and a distillation of time. Fragments of previous incarnations are embedded in the final image. At other times broad thick areas of impasto and wax create a mottled dense surface. Sometimes pieces of fabric,, cloth, or paper find their way onto the surface as collage elements.
Finding her voice ultimately in the world of light, color, and texture, Amadea’s work has a distinctly landscape feel. Sometimes the paintings are directly inspired from nature, sometimes they are depictions of psychological terrain or a spiritual realm.
In the last few years the vast abstract landscapes have become punctuated by text, words, symbols, markings and even figures that have a charged meaning and significance to her. A fragment of a dream, image, or thought , is recorded as in an entry in a diary.
Sometimes words are legible sometimes not.
Since she works large, her paintings become full-scale expanding spaces themselves, big enough to dance across, or at least big enough to get lost in.
Amadea is in fact a passionate surfer and dancer and one can feel a spontaneity and a sense of movement and freedom tangibly present in her work as it is in her life.
Amadea’s work reads like poetry of the physical world, with painting acting, literally and metaphorically, as a bridge between the mind and the body, landscape and memory.
