Amanda Westley (Conway-Jones) First Solo Show at Japingka
It’s great to see a room full of paintings by Amanda Westley (Conway-Jones), who is a new artist to Japingka Gallery. Amanda has put together a wonderful group of small and medium-sized paintings showing aspects of her life on the coast at Victor Harbor in South Australia.
Her paintings evoke the sense of being by the ocean and the coastline, and sometimes exploring the view when looking inland from there. She structures her paintings with blocks of harmonious colour, all painted in dots with many tonal effects. Some works reference the ocean using tones of blues and greys with touches of green and Naples yellow. Other ocean paintings use purples and blues.
Amanda runs the structures of the dots in either contrasting directions or contrasting tensions. She does this by changing the width and the volume of the blocks of colour. Sometimes she bends the shapes so that they become either reminiscent of the ocean or the folding contours of the coastline.
Amanda’s work appealed to us immediately when we saw it. We invited her to have her own exhibition space at Japingka, to put a range of these colours up on the wall in one area. To exhibit her works together like this is a fantastic opportunity for this talented emerging artist. We are thrilled with the result.
Amanda has done a wonderful job putting together a group of paintings across a palette of colours. I think we would call them tonal paintings in a sense. They run from works that are predominantly earth colours, varying through oranges, reds, pinks and pale yellows, to the colours that are reminiscent of the coastline. Some of these blend purples and creams and whites, which evoke a winter feel – the rocks along the coast and the impact of the coast and the sea meeting up.
This is a wonderfully compact and concise show. It is a first solo exhibition from a hugely promising young artist, Amanda Westley (Conway-Jones).
View Amanda's Exhibition: Amanda Westley Exhibition