“For many years landscape, our connection to place and how we think about the genre of landscape painting has been the subject of my work. My paintings of landscapes are as interested in the idea of bringing beauty into being as considering ideas about how landscape is experienced today in this fast paced world.
For many of us, the experience of landscape is often filtered through the tightly shut windows of fast cars with iPods blaring, navigation systems guiding and climate controlled air-conditioning adjusting the temperature. The gap between the land and our experience of it growing ever larger. My motion landscapes look to reflect the move away from the historically still images so often associated with landscape painting.
My work is quite subjective, driven by thoughts, emotions and sensations. Sometimes moody, sometimes light. In my painting, it’s not just what I see, so much as how I feel about what I see. How I personally feel about specific views and spaces are the catalyst to determine which I will paint. And how I feel as I push and pull the paint around the surface in the studio is what drives the end result.
It may seem ominous that our experiences of life are increasingly mediated through technology rather than sitting in a sacred space. Yet each development – from the car to digital cameras and mobile phones – unlocks ways of seeing and capturing our surroundings that have the potential to cause us to see them afresh and experience them in different unexpected ways.”
Amanda van Gils, (2015)
Image: ‘Inga Daintree’, Amanda van Gils, oil on canvas, 122 x 152 cm,
