Amanda Gordon

Amanda Gordon is a watercolour artist who specialises in British wildlife. Largely self taught, she began her art career undertaking pet portraiture in pencil, before developing the loose, fluid style in paint that she now uses to portray her subjects.

She finds that the unpredictable and spontaneous nature of watercolour is perfect to capture the movement and wild transient beauty of the wildlife she studies, as it is not only the animal itself she is seeking to portray, but the intense emotional response she experiences when she sees it in its natural environment.

Each painting begins as a carefully developed outline which is then pared down until she feels that only the essential details remain to convey the spirit and movement, rather than the anatomically correct body, of her subject. She uses both a naturalistic colour palette in her work and a more vivid, colourful range, depending on the composition and mood of the piece. The paintings are finished with a splattering of paint over the image, much the same as the patina of an antique mirror, to emphasise the distinction between the reality and her emotional representation of it.

As a child Amanda watched the deer that came down from the hills into her garden near Edinburgh, and later in Yorkshire and then in Nottinghamshire she would spend hours watching the hares boxing in the fields around her home in winter. Now she lives on the Hampshire/Surrey border and works from her garden studio painting the wildlife that she sees there - foxes, kingfishers, herons and even roe deer.