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 and Kenya, East Africa. The experience of Africa is what has remained in her spirit and shaped her senses and aesthetic creativity.  The wondrous expanses of space, intricate texture, and saturated light continue to fundamentally inform her entire artistic enterprise.  Moving to Los Angeles in 1990 answered a deep yearning for renewed proximity to the elements, the ocean horizon, and the desert.

Educated at Yale University and the New York Studio School Amadea’s earliest academic exposure to fine art was grounded in analytical discipline and planar analysis, securely rooted in figurative study. Her early work fluidly melds the epic sense of expansive drama instilled in her in Africa, with the precision and compositional structure of her training.

Amadea is fundamentally an Abstract Expressionist artist, creating paintings that transmit her intensely physical process.  Her visual imagery is a deep dialogue between form, color, rhythm and space.   

She does not begin a painting with an agenda.  Each painting is a unique journey that unravels and reveals itself as it goes along, finding direction through the act itself.

Fascinated by the sensuality of the paint, using a variety of techniques, Amadea builds up the surface texture, an important element in each painting.  She uses thin washes of paint, transparent colors built up slowly over time.  This layering creates a sense of depth and a distillation of time.  Fragments of previous incarnations may be embedded in the final image. Broad thick areas of impasto and wax create a mottled dense surface.  Collage with fabric or paper find their way onto the canvas and add to the seduction of Bailey’s paintings. 

Amadea’s paintings are often depictions of psychological terrain and have a strong narrative statement. Vast abstractions may be punctuated by text, symbols and markings that have a charged meaning.  Sometimes words are legible, sometimes not.  A fragment of a dream or thought is recorded as in a diary.

Amadea’s large paintings become full-scale expanding spaces themselves, big enough to dance across, or big enough to get lost in.

The work reads like poetry of the physical world, with paint acting, literally and metaphorically, as a bridge between the mind, the body, landscape and memory.

Bailey has had solo exhibitions in respected galleries and her work has been acquired by many private collections Internationally.

When Amadea is not in her studio she can be found surfing, dancing, and traveling the globe, passions which inform and impact her artistic practice.