Contemporary Expressionist Painter
Amadea is a formally trained and experienced expressionist painter whose artistic exploration is captured in large scale. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibits both nationally and internationally, and six of her paintings grace the walls of Halle Berry’s home. Amadea’s commissioned artwork has also been featured in television, films and commercials.
Amadea’s work is influenced by the years she spent as a child living Kenya, East Africa, where she was free to express herself as she played and danced in a playground of vast fields. She was shaped by the vivid colors and pure natural elements that surrounded her; pink flamingos, mud hut villages, the beautiful horses she rode and the sweet sugar cane she and her friends would find and chew on as they walked to school. The adventure, freedom and spirit of her time spent in Kenya are consistently conveyed in the rich colors and textures of her art.
However, it wasn’t until Amadea was studying at Yale University that she discovered her true passion for art: she found herself engrossed in a retrospective of Claude Monet’s water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during her summer break before her senior year of college. “I was transported by the vast expanses of color, the abstract forms swirling and unfolding,” Amadea explains. “The paintings connected me to my childhood and invited me to play, dance and explore.”
From this point forward she started painting and began taking classes in drawing, painting, and sculpture during her remaining time at Yale. Upon graduating from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, Amadea went on to further develop as an artist by training at The New York Studio School in drawing and painting and was tutored by figurative expressionist painter George McNeil. After graduating from The New York Studio School, Amadea was dedicated to painting daily in her studio and spent 11 years in New York nurturing her craft.
To regain a sense of openness and connectedness to nature, Amadea moved to Los Angeles 20 years ago. She bought her home and created her dream studio. When you peek inside her studio in the afternoons, you can see Amadea’s body moving purposefully and joyfully as she works on her installation-size canvases. When she begins a painting she is often unsure of where and how it will end. The painting unfolds and reveals itself in a process that Amadea finds endlessly fascinating and rewarding. It is this exhilarating journey that is thus captured on her copious canvas. “As a painter I get to feel again and again the sense of expansiveness, spontaneity and endless possibilities that I knew as a child on the Serengeti Plains under the large African sky,” says Amadea.
Amadea’s creativity doesn’t stop at the art she creates: she’s also creative in the way that she sells it. She’s listed her home as a shooting location for film and TV, which recently led to a national magazine shoot at her studio. The editor from the magazine was so impressed with Amadea’s work that she called a friend in New York, who will now be showing Amadea’s work. Amadea is living her dream as an artist residing in Southern California. When she is not painting she enjoys surfing, dancing and traveling, finding inspiration in everything and everyone she meets.
