Featured Artist: Amanda Case Millis!

*From Horn’s Hill* by Amanda Case Millis | 16″ x 20″ | Oil on Linen Panel

Beautiful painting, right? I bet a lot of you know exactly where this is located. A place we all love and admire. A place where the light is magical, the cliffs overlooking the ocean are mesmerizing, the flowers are stunning and the people are genuine. Many of you have stood in this exact spot while eating your ice cream cone…

From the Novelty while standing on Horn’s Hill – Monhegan Island (Maine). Ahhh, now it’s familiar, right? This painting is fabulous, I love how the bright light is focused on the small white building, stunning! You can’t miss “the red house” or the Island Inn in the distance – welcoming people to come stay with them for oh so long.

The world is so very small. I ran across Amanda’s work on Instagram – she had done a very cool monotype, and that spurred me to check out her work. I love her work and wanted to share it with you. I contacted her, very nice – and was looking at her website, paintings and reading her artist’s bio/statement – and see that she has painted on Monhegan Island (Maine) – and not only painted there but was the Artist in Residence one year. Monhegan has been a favorite of ours for so long (we just haven’t made it back recently) – we went for many years and met the same group of wonderful people year after year. We still keep in touch with some. One of the most interesting people I’ve met, Penny Marshall, was a friend of a friend who came to Monhegan. Penny started to also visit (in her 90’s!) and she became part of the gang. Her and I worked on a blog because she needed to tell her stories. Penny’s blog: Nearly Ninety, check it out! We emailed daily and I kept telling her she needed to write a book. She went to Smith College – as I’m reading Amanda’s bio, so did she. Penny would have loved her. She’s been gone for a few years – and is missed! How fascinated Penny would have been to talk to Amanda!

Be sure to check out more of Amanda’s paintings – all different subject matter, every painting is so different, so interesting and just gorgeous!

Also, check it out if you’re in the York, Maine area: wonderful group show at George Marshall Store Gallery:

AMANDA’S INFO

WEBSITE | Instagram

About the Artist (via Amanda’s website):

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My oil paintings are visual stories about my personal relationship to place. Painting is how I process the world and expand my understanding of myself and surroundings. Light is frequently at the center of my exploration. It is magic to me that a painting can become its own world, with its own light. Each painting requires thought, attention, and emotion. I love that painting is an ongoing learning experience and puzzle. It can never be fully understood or mastered, only followed and responded to. In that way, I find it a metaphor for life.

Alla prima painting and plein air work are integral to my practice. They keep me alert and awake. The work has often been small scale, holding the intimacy of my experience of looking and responding. I am also interested in making large-scale paintings that function as meditations upon place and create an immersive experience in relationship to the human body.

I feel most alive when I work in collaboration with the elements or as I experience and express the feeling of an environment. There are certain times when the impulse to translate is high:

When I feel the quiet and then the buzz of electricity as a storm rolls in.

When the light is alive as day slips into night.

When the fog hangs heavy in the air, obscuring and revealing the landscape in new ways.

When the light slants in a room just so.

When an uprooted tree breaks out of the earth, more animated than those standing politely in its company.

When the sun dances wildly though the woods.

When I stumble upon mysterious visual moments that demand painting.

I will often paint or collage a motif through several iterations, over subsequent days, months or even years, to deepen my understanding of the subject. Recurring motifs include interiors, nocturnes, windows, roots and trees, and the sea.

As I work, whether it is from life or memory and photographs, I integrate my physical observations with my interior feelings – translating the seen and felt into a language of shape and color.

BIO

Amanda Case Millis is a Boston-based painter who is deeply inspired by place. She received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BA from Smith College. Her work has been recognized in exhibitions throughout the US and Australia and Europe, including a solo show in Germany in 2023.

Amanda lived in Sydney, Australia from 2012-17. There she taught at ArtEst Art School and was a finalist in major national prizes.

Amanda has been awarded painting residencies at PLAYA, the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Monson Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Eastern Frontier Educational Foundation, Mount Gretna School of Art, Monhegan Artists Residency, Kloster Bentlage (Germany), the Jentel Foundation, and Arte Ventura (Spain). She is the recipient of a 2024 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in painting.