John Armstrong: Hi everybody.
Thank you for coming. It is my pleasure
to introduce Amanda Clyne, who I met at a
graduate of the art and art history
program’s birthday party last spring, and–
in chatting with Amanda, she mentioned
that she was going to have a studio show
the next day so I went to her studio and
saw–mainly her most current work but
also some of her previous work with
which I had an acquaintance, and then I
went and read her graduate thesis which
offered an interesting reflection on the
complicated history of portraiture within
the Western tradition of painting and I–
was very impressed with her work
and I thought she'd make an excellent
speaker. Amanda started out her studies
at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
She then went on to complete her
Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Ontario
College of Art and Design University,
followed by her MFA at York University.
She has recently attended the
competitive residency at the Vermont
Studios, and she has been awarded an
Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant.
So,
that said, please join me in welcoming
Amanda. [applause]
Amanda Clyne: Thank you, John.
I actually love giving these things, I
know a lot of artists don’t. [laughs] I love
talking to students, I think because I
became an art student later in life, I was
very self-conscious about the process of
learning art and having to shed my
lawyer identity to become an artist–it
felt very foreign to me so I've always–I
always sort of have this big picture
cloud above me, sort of overlooking
things and seeing how weird it is to
actually become an artist and
questioning what that means. So, this is a
quote I came to–I–look at YouTube videos
of artist talks and stuff, and this was a
panel discussion about a show of Louise
Nevelson, who is one of my favourite
artists, and Arnold Glimcher was
actually the dealer for Agnes Martin as
well, who is my other favourite artist– [laughs] and I
loved this idea that the art is in the
artists head and what we see in artworks
is not actually the art but clues to the
art that resides in this otherwise
unreachable place. So, I'm hoping–I’ve
made this a very student-centered talk
and I'm hoping that I sort of provide
you with a map of my practice. It's quite
diverse and so if you think of
everything I give you as a clue to who I
am as an artist I hope by the end you
have a–a good picture. I'm going to start
a little tiny bit text-heavy and then I
go through a ton of images really
quickly, but–I wanted to just go over the
main themes that you'll see generally in
all of my work from the beginning.
Portraiture has become–it’s a later thing
that's come up but it's a–
it's sort of a–more of a concept than a
visual genre that interests me and what
does it mean to represent ourselves
through the body and through the face
and the limits of that. The limits of an
image–I–my relationship to art was not
as a maker at the beginning and so, I’m–I
feel very connected to images as almost
as, you know–as a real thing–almost
anthropomorphically, and I'm very
conscious of the limit of that
relationship and how do we get inside an
image, how does an image change over time
in meaning, and how our relationship
changes to those images over time. And I
also, importantly, have come to really–I
think–seeing art almost
anthropomorphically. On the flip side, see
the physical person as also an image. So
the issues that I have with photography
or painting as an image, I apply also to
the body. Femininity is a shock for me, I
was a very Type-A corporate kid, I wanted
to work with the boys and [laughs] work in
New York and what's come out–but I've always
been very drawn to a very feminine
aesthetic and somehow in my work, it's
become more and more and more feminine
and I'm always grappling with what that
means and–so you'll see that throughout
my work. And the aesthetic is something
that I–has really–I’ve become more
conscious of as I've done more working
as the years have gone by and you see
threads this commonality in the
different bodies of work. The image-making
process might–um, oh–I just lost the mic–
[technical issues]
[technical issues]
[laughter]
Technical difficulties–so, like I said
the aesthetic is really something I
don’t–I haven't pursued this as an
aesthetic in my work as an intention but it’s
something that I'm discovering as my
work has evolved over the years.
So yes, the image-making process–you'll
see that my work always is very
conscious of the surface of the image.
The affect of textiles and couture is
really important to me. Textiles was sort
of my first love–from a visual
perspective, and I–I relate to textiles
like I relate to art and couture for me
is one of these fantastical explorations
of–this is going to go in and out I think–sort of
fantastical alternatives to the body
where we reimagine how the body could be.
The dignity of the feminine–I think–
the idea of dignity has–once I came–
sort of–I heard myself saying that word I
realized how important it is to me–I–
my work is implicitly very critical
of the representation of women–
highly sexualized in our culture and I'm
not a prude,
I think there's lots of great art about
the nude body but there seems to be a
response to nudity with nudity, and how
do we represent–how do we represent or
almost expand the definition or maybe
redefine the definition of a feminine
body with a–with a sense of dignity, and
I think having worked in a very male
environment, I find that intriguing and
important. And the last is a sense of
mourning–my work has always had a–sort
of a melancholic feel and I've never
been able to totally explain [laughs] why, but I
recently again heard myself saying to
somebody this idea of mourning and–
there's sort of an impossibility in what
I am striving for in my work and I think
my work is very conscious of that
impossibility and there's a sense of
mourning–that impossibility throughout–
throughout the pieces. So, I'm not going
to talk this much with text for the rest
of it, it will go–I’ll go quickly through
images but if you can keep those themes
in mind as I go through I think you'll–I
think will help you see the work. So, I
just wanted to say that I was a lawyer
in New York–I always wanted to be
in New York, I had–like I said, big
corporate fantasies. The white building
there with the angle–if you watch Law
& Order, that’s at the beginning [laughs] of
Law & Order. That’s City Court Center and that bluish-green
building beside it was where I
worked. And I was there for almost seven
years, and I–had never made art before
that, but I–if you think of this idea
that being an artist is about sort of
discovering the clues to what your
perception is of the world–I think I–I
think we all always have that
before the making begins and–and I think
looking is a big part of shaping that
perception and that vision, and I looked
a lot. I was exposed to a lot of art and
I wanted to show you just some of the
images that, as a pre-artist, I felt I
really related to and felt like in some
ways it reflected a piece of me that was
not seen otherwise. So the–
the previous one was El Greco,
this is a Giacometti piece. Agnes
Martin–this piece, I actually had a
little love affair with at the
Guggenheim. When I first discovered it, I
didn't know who Agnes Martin was and I
would almost say this painting changed my life and
it's for people who have never seen an
Agnes Martin in real life–there's really
no way to judge whether you'll connect
to it or not. It’s very much a–an
experience in the flesh but, um–yeah, it’s–
I aspire to be as eloquent as her.
Joan Mitchell–I was always a big fan of
Abstract Expressionism–(Willem) de Kooning
obviously–(Giorgio) Morandi is one of the all-time
greats for me–the simplicity of it–again,
there’s an eloquence to it–
and there is a real dignity to his
work and yet there's also a real sense
of humanity and relationships. When I saw
the retrospective of this–of Morandi at
the Met and–they really start to become
almost individuals as you go through and
it's almost like a story is being told
as you go through the show and it–
it was incredibly moving and–the
bottles become much more than bottles.
(James McNeill) Whistler, which I know is very romantic–
everybody loves Whistler. [laughs] But, he has a
great sense of absence–again, I think he
also has a great sense of dignity in his
representation of women and there's a
silence to his work that really
interests me–there's a stillness to it
that I really like. And Van Gogh, which–I think
everybody–before you come to art and
learn more about contemporary art–knows
Van Gogh, but I've actually been
revisiting his paintings more recently.
I love his colour–the toxicity of
it. I think so much of his emotion comes
from this toxic colour.
[inaudible]
>>Amanda Clyne: Seems to disappear if I talk too far away–
I’m either yelling at you or you can't hear
me.
>>Audience: Yeah, the podium doesn't like to be
touched too much. 
>>Amanda Clyne: Sorry, I'm very fidgety.
[technical issues]
>>Amanda Clyne: Can you hear
me now? Okay great, so I’ll move a little further
away. Oh good. [laughs] So anyways, so the colour
in Van Gogh in that–again, the sort of
toxic nature of his colours, and the
melancholy of his work, I’m very drawn to–
and I really love mark-making
and his–particularly his drawings that
just sort of grow out of this
accumulation of marks is–I love it. And
these are–this is a fragment of the textiles–
a historical textile from the Met and
like I said, I–I really somehow relate to
these as–as art. These old textile
fragments just break my heart–and
fragmentation you'll see is an essential
part of my work. And the last slide is
a quilt from the women of ‘Gee's Bend’
which–I don't know if you're familiar
with that, but it's a group of women from
Alabama who–and it’s now been generations of
women who create these incredible quilts
with a very–and it’s–it took years
for them to actually be seen as art, but
quilting was sort of the first creative
thing I ever did–my grandmother taught
me, and that notion of taking things
apart and putting them back together in
your own way has really influenced my
process.
So, when I went to OCAD–that quote about
clues
really–I found applied to myself and
making the work gave me the clues–as to
who I was as an artist, which I really
didn't know obviously, since I hadn't
made anything before. So, I was very
experimental–but I knew I wanted to
paint so I didn't really experiment in a
lot of other media. This is a spray paint
on canvas–cut apart and pieces of it
sewn together. I did a body of work of
this–I’m just going to show you a couple.
This was a larger one that was the
assignment–if you want to know what the
assignment was for school [laughs] it was to
create a piece based on two different
movies, and so I chose ‘Birdman of
Alcatraz’ and ‘Winged Migration.’ And then I
did–sort of simultaneously with the sewn
works–
I did these drip paintings–again, grew
out of sort of process based
explorations and obviously knowing my
interest you can see the textile
references, but I also wanted to
highlight that these were really in
response to images that existed. I was–I
wanted to not just make work but somehow
I wanted to be in dialogue with the
paintings that I had loved as a non-artist.
So here's an example of the
original painting, and the painting that
I ended up doing.
And so, in third-year Ron Shuebrook, who–I
hope you all know who he is–wonderful
painter–was my instructor and really
pushed me to be more ambitious in my
work so I moved to oil and realized that
I
actually wasn't bad at painting [laughs] –acrylic
was not my medium and suddenly I was
actually able to do things that I had
not been able to do in acrylic and it
was incredibly liberating. So, this is
based on work by Whistler and I did
research on the construction of a
sound wave and it's a–it's
actually an acrylic sound wave
underneath the oil that moves through.
And then I started to work from my own images
–this is a photograph I took in
Grange Park behind OCAD in the snow, and
this is I think as close as I have gotten
to my Agnes Martin [laughs] and the–the–the
grid is actually a gesso and so I take
the grid and then painted the whole
thing and then took all the tape off.
This was based on a photograph of my
grandmother's dress. My grandmother was a
very mean, very beautiful woman who loved
fashion–and a drunk. [laughter] But I worshipped
her and she was very sophisticated and
very cultured, and she taught me a lot.
So, anyways this piece is important
to me–and here the–the grid is actually
spray-painted on top in a very pale pink.
So then I get to this process–I took
this picture down by the beaches because
I felt these little blossoms look like
earrings [laughs] I don’t know–it was a stupid
thing but I liked it, and–so I printed it
on my printer and I put the photo paper
in backwards and what came out was this
beautiful wet thing and I'm like–
I was like this is so beautiful but I didn't
know what to do with it, and the ink was
really oily. So I put it aside and I came
back the next day hoping it would dry–and
of course, it's oil–it doesn't dry. It has
nothing to absorb and–but it has spread
and–this is the last–it–
it looks closer to the original when it
first comes out of the printer
but it had spread into this beautiful, almost
watercolor-y kind of image and I was
hooked.
And–once I finally realized I could
photograph this in order to keep it and
work with it, I was off the races.
So, in thesis I–so this is just before thesis–
no this is in thesis–I started to choose
images that I had sort of an ambivalent
relationship to, that were hyper feminine,
you know, sort of a spectacle of
femininity but at the same time that I
felt was beautiful and–and very
drawn to. And then I started repeating
the image in these sort of soft edges
and they were so fun to paint–I mean I was
having so much fun with the paint and
because I wasn't an accomplished
figurative painter, each painting was a
real challenge for me and it was really
fun to see them evolve, and–this was my
thesis work–the final semester of thesis
and it's a huge piece–it's 8 feet by
12 feet and it's really about the life
of an image–these are three paintings
that are hung in the Prado with images
of people looking at them in the Prado.
And one thing that–at first I was very
much about the femininity and the sort
of history of the image and I was very
much talking about image–my attraction
to these works was about the image. And
yet, when I got to painting the faces
and really studying these faces it was–
struck me so much how these–these
enormous constructions that sort of
engage these women were so beautiful
and were supposed to really be
propaganda for their power and their
stations, and yet their faces were so
miserable–particularly the one in
the blue dress and I mean Velázquez did
not hide how miserable she was,
and I started to focus on the face, and I
lost these soft fragments and I started
creating these sort of mirrored thin
fragments and cutting out–and using
images that were–they were images
of powerful women in–again representing
wealth and sort of this fantasy but at
the same time sort of lurking within the
image was a vulnerability and there was
something about dissolving the
photograph. Their faces became not their
faces, and their faces became this
vulnerable thing so it was almost like
you were stripping off a mask off the
person. And so these are like–photo–
So I started photographing with this body
of work with the hard fragments. The
stages of the photograph becoming more
and more dissolved and these are layers
of fragments from that series of
photographs of the process. And I started
to realize that I could create imaginary
portraits with these fragments and
really evoke different faces, and a real
confusion of what this woman actually
looked like.
So my first show was–I set it up like a
hall of mirrors, so all the paintings
were done based on the same source image
and it was like they were reflecting
into each other. After that show, I
started just experimenting with how far
I could push this idea and you'll see me
using–sort of, spaces of absence and the
image sort of falling away into
lightness or falling away into darkness
in different ways. And this is the last
piece I did of that series and I was–
and like I said, these were all a real
challenge for me to paint and so
every one, once I finally got the
composition together,
there was a genuine excitement about
what is this going to look like in paint
how am I going to translate this into
an interesting painting–and can I make it
what I think I see in this source
material. And this was the first time I
had worked with transparencies and being
able to achieve that look of
transparency was–was fun for me. However,
at the same time I had gotten to the end
of my interest in this work and, like I
said, if you think discover–discovering
who you are as an artist comes through
the making of the work–the work for me–
there were no clues left. It wasn't
telling me anything new and so I needed
new clues and I needed to figure out
something else. So I went to grad school
and just told myself do not paint
a fragment. [Laughs] Whatever you do, you can't use
tape, you can't use–I didn't want to
paint from photographs and as–you know,
meticulously as I had been, and this is
the picture of my grad show. Initially I–
when nothing was working and I was
getting very frustrated, I went back to
my ink process to see if there was
something more interesting that I could
do with it so this is the original image,
this is when it first comes out of the
printer and then I began to paint into
it and photograph it as I was painting
it. And, eventually the ink was gone, and
at first I thought the photographs of
what I had created with the water was
going to be the interesting part, so I
would put these aside and then, you know–
I didn't want to throw them out because
they were still drying and the next
morning I woke up and looked at them and
I–it was like I had created a
ghost and I scanned them at a really high
resolution and-
printed the large on a rag paper so–
there's a real question of what–what it
is when you see it. Is it a watercolour? Is
it–people have bought it on mylar. They
don't realize it's a photograph and I
like that sort of question of what
medium actually is. At the same time–my
thesis advisor was a print maker and I
loved him, he was an Agnes Martin fan,
which we bonded over and he really spoke
my language. He has a very poetic
sensibility and I–
he got me hooked on print-making, let's
just say that. I wanted to try it–I
wanted to try something new and I was
getting so frustrated in the paint
studio, I thought if I try another medium
maybe I–maybe it'll spark new ideas. So, I
learned to do photogravure etchings.
These are based on ink prints that I
initially dissolved and painted into and
then layered and created these–one is
with a black ink and one is with a
graphite ink.
These are screen prints–small screen
prints, that almost killed me. [laughs]
I found screen printing–I think I was
printing on paper that was not
conducive to screen printing so it was
incredibly hard to get some consistent.
And I tried traditional etching which is
the image on the left and–and then again
I like playing with the digital layering
and twisting of–of an
image and so I did a series of three
images that were digital layering of
that etching, and that's one example of
it. And I was really interested in those,
but I have to say they weren't leading
me anywhere that I wanted to go in the
paint studio and I was getting tired of
the face and the face was always this
white woman staring back at me that
really didn't seem to reflect my values,
and
I wanted my work to be something
different.
So, I started exploring what happens if
the body disappears and what happens to
the woman if she's made up of
ornamentation alone. And these were the two
paintings that I would say I'm most proud
of and was most intrigued by that were
in my show at the end–but I literally
did not really start painting in earnest
in grad school until the last semester so
there was so much more still to figure
out and I finished grad school happy
that I had put those fragments behind me,
and was really using mark-making
and had left the body but still evoking
the body, and still using fashion but
slowly getting away from a traditional
look of fashion–the grey one was the
first one, the darker one was the last one
I did. So, I ran away. I think I had hoped
that grad school, I’d end with this sort
of triumphant show–I was represented by
a gallery at the time–she gave–she allowed
me to show my grad exhibition at her
gallery, which was incredibly generous,
and I–I wish I hadn't shown there
because I think it implied a level of
resolution that I knew wasn't there.
However, I was happy with how the
collection of pieces seemed to tell a
bigger story than any one of them, and
that idea that–which goes back to
the initial quote–that idea that I
could create my vision, what I want to
say, but it’s–I can't say it all in one
painting or one way of making a painting–
I found incredibly liberating. So, with
that in mind–my dad has a small
cottage on the Ottawa River and he goes
to Florida in the winter, so I moved into
his little cottage by myself for the
winter and it was the winter that was
the coldest winter on record. [laughs] It was
minus 40, and the snowplower broke, and the car
broke down and wouldn’t start–it was interesting.
But, I triumphed–and learned to kill mice, and
it was–it–honestly I think one of the
big–people say, you know, what did you
learn and–you do learn a lot of
resilience and how tough you are, but I
think the biggest thing for me is you
learn to not complain because there's
nobody there and nobody cares. And if
something isn't working or you're having
a bad day or you're getting frustrated–
nobody cares, nobody's going to feel
sorry for you, nobody's going to give you
a pep talk and it really forced me to–to
just suck it up and try something else.
And, so the first couple months I tried a
bunch of paintings and honestly, you
probably could have described them as
good paintings. They were more
expressionist–I was trying to loosen up,
but they didn't feel like me. I felt like
I'm making somebody else's work–and
there's just something–I just–I’m not
bringing anything to the world with
these paintings–these paintings have
been seen before, and so–and I think I
was–I set so many rules on myself, you know,
don't paint from a photograph and get
away from the digital and–finally, I said
you know what, go back to the process
that enabled you to do your previous
work–but change it up. Dismantle the
images in a different way, and create the
new image in a different way, and paint
in a different way. So what I did was, I
started taking digital fragments from
various images–still our historical
paintings and fashion photography, and
putting them together digitally, and
and then painting them. And what I–because what
I was–part of what I was missing in the
mirrored works was being able to play
more with the paint, I wanted to paint every
layer in a different way and I didn't
know what way but every–every one was a
new challenge. So–and, the simpler ones–this is
actually one of my favourite paintings. I
painted this painting about four times, and
the reason is, the hardest thing to paint–
and I remember probably my first
painting instructor telling me this and
it kind of went over my head at the time–
he was showing me a Velázquez painting–
was that painting absence is one of the
hardest things–painting nothing, and still
making it an interesting painting. So
finding ways to make this surface–have a
sense of depth by keeping it one colour,
not making it feel like it's in a room
or it's in a landscape. I didn't want–
I didn't want a sense of place. The
previous one was too specific for me and
I was trying to get away from that, and
finally creating this sort of glaze
at the beginning of the top colour
and then did this sort of woven dry
brushing on top in multiple layers, and
created this sort of sheer veil over the
surface and–and then painted it in these–
in this thick paint that I like to sort of say that
it's almost like little expressionist
gestures, but the size of embroidered
stitches. So, it actually–you know, people
think it's very tight–which i think is a
crazy critique–but it’s–it's exact, you
know, it’s–it’s–each mark matters where
it is but the painting of the mark
itself is like this little painted
moment that I actually really have fun
painting. This was an even more
exaggerated background. I took the
pattern from a dress, and made that the
backdrop–and again trying to get colours
that I knew we're going to be on the
subsequent
years in the background, so it felt like
it was in the same space and bringing in
more traditional ways of painting–and
mixing it with these more impasto-ed
techniques. And the background was just hard
to see–I think, in this slide, I sort of
applied it and then took off pieces. So,
not only do you have the sort of look of
erasure or subtraction in the fragments
themselves, but in the way I painted it–I
also try to use that in the painting
techniques. This is one of the most
abstract ones I did. It was also
extremely hard, mostly because if you see
this painting in real life, the sort of
beaded part is quite physical, and it
really looks like it's been stitched on
the surface and getting that–sort of
quality into the paint took a lot more
than I anticipated. [laughs] You know, it goes back to–
you know, you see a de Kooning painting
and you think he painted it in five minutes
and of course he didn’t.
This is another small one–this ground, I
actually–it was a mistake, I painted a
ground and when I woke up in the morning
I was like–it was so not what I wanted
and had a texture that was horrible and so
I started scraping it down in these
little small gestures in a desperate
attempt to take off the paint to not
waste the canvas and it created this
beautiful sort of Sheen–with great
variety of surface in it and I–then the
goal was, make a beautiful painting for
that surface. This is also a very small
piece–this is a fragment of a ruffle and
I still conceive of these pieces as
portraits and this–this piece in
particular was very important to me as–I
think it feels most like an abstract
portrait to me. This is one of the most
recent ones I've done and–
and again this is forming a body through
these fragments, and imagining a body
looking other than–other than the flesh.
I think this one for me is verging too
much on mimicking the human body, so I
feel less satisfied by that than some of
the other ones. But I now have this
fabulous studio which I will show you
and which I can't believe I have, and–but
I'm able to hang up the work which is
very rare because usually your studio is
so small that you're not able to see all
your work at once until you have your
show and then it's a big moment in the
show to see how the pieces work together
and I have an enormous luxury right now
of being able to do that in my own space.
And when I hung up these pieces–and
because I don’t have that much space–I had
to hang them close together–
I loved the dialogue between them and how
they related to each other, and at first
all of them are random sizes because I
build my own stretchers, and before I
went to Ottawa I made as many stretchers
as I could with the wood that I had left
over. So, there was no rhyme or reason to
the shape or sizes of the canvas, but
seeing them hung together–they seemed to
also be fragments in and of themselves
and that idea seemed–seemed like it had
potential. The quote I found recently–
reading, and I think for me–I love this
idea of utopia being a desire to
transform the reality we have, and I
think my utopia is to exist–for everyone
to exist without a body or a body that
we design of our own, and that doesn't
come with all the burdens now that
bodies are–have to contend with. And–and
again the sense of mourning that comes
that that utopia is ultimately
not possible. So this is my studio today and
I thank the gods every morning.
Truly. I can't believe I work there. It
came to me through a very strange
sequence of events that really should
never have happened.
So, I'm taking it as a sign from God, and
I'm trying to use the space–I feel like
this is a very small window of time where
I have this amazing space and I'm trying
to use it as productively as possible. So,
I am making these little improvised
works–I started doing this in grad
school but I am continuing to do it–just
because it’s–these are small eleven by
fourteen, eight by ten–they keep me moving
the paint around, they keep me–really
exploring what paint can do. I'd like to
think that you never have all the
answers to that, and your way of painting
is continually changing. These I did at the
Vermont residency recently. This also
came from me trying to do those figures,
and getting so sick of the dress form–I
just wanted to shoot myself and so I
started just tearing all of them away
and wiping them away, and wiping them
away, and eventually I got an image that
actually–the middle one was the first
one where I'm like ‘I think something
interesting is happening’ and without it
looking like (Gerhard) Richter or like
(Mark) Rothko or sort of the more obvious
references–I'm sort of–and
these are very small, these are ten by
twelve. So again, they look like little
fragments, little pieces of textile and
in the studio, I've been playing with
hanging with them with the other pieces–
the other sort of ornamented bodies, and
I think there's an interesting
connection being made. This was the piece
I did in Vermont. I needed to make the
image simple because I was only there
for a month and–oil paint takes forever
to dry so you can't do something that
takes too long, and I–so it just had one
fragment and–the
question was how simple can I make the
image and still make it an interesting
painting–which, sort of, the orange one again–
was the–the one success that I've
had so far. And I wanted each of these to
be a great painting on their own, but
having them all time in the studio and
working on them all at the same time, I
came to realize they're one painting, and
that, for me–you know, when you work in
these tiny little ways, you can't make a
huge painting, it'll take you six months,
and you can't progress through the
ideas fast enough because all you're
doing is focusing on this one painting.
So, this was the first revelation to me
that I could make a big painting but it
would be a collection of painted
fragments–of different pieces. Now, this
is uniform pieces and one–based on one
dress but I think there's a lot of
flexibility there, and this piece is
called ‘Undressed’ and each–each painting
is sort of in a state of unfinish. You
really can see–again, see the process
of the piece being made and there is
sort of a conscious element of it being
a painting in progress. So, now my
confession–I love this quote–this
cartoon. People always ask me how do
you have such a beautiful studio, and don't
you work, and how do you support it? And I–
it is extremely hard. I think it is easy
when you see a painter paints for a
living to think that they've made it, but
there's either ‘you haven't made it’ and
‘you've made it’ and that is so not true.
And I–I actually did apply for a million
jobs after grad school. I wanted the
freedom of not making money from my art,
and–because my work felt so unresolved–
and I could not even get an interview.
Nobody seems to want to hire an next
lawyer who has an MFA, so I thought you
know–
I've made this bed, and I have got to make
it work somehow.
And, it was a rude awakening and–
particularly you know, at first
everyone says ‘you're so brave you quit
your job,
before you made so much money’ and it didn’t feel brave
because I thought, you know I can just
go back if this doesn't work out, like I’m
a corporate lawyer–and once a lawyer, always
a lawyer–and you know what, ten years
later, you're not a lawyer anymore. And, it
feels like now–now guts are required
and now I feel like I have to be more
brave and there is no going back, and so
I am thinking–so over the summer–I
actually was very sick this summer and
spent a lot of time in bed and it forced
me to panic fully because this new work
that I did that I'm actually very proud
of–these ornaments pieces, you know, this sort of
work–
I haven't found an audience for it, so I
don't have a show coming up, and I left
my gallery and I have not approached a
new gallery and a gallery hasn't
approached me–and I have to say I've
been sort of avoiding that because I
actually am able to make more money on
my own at this time, when I–when every
dollar counts so much. So I'm not rushing
into that, but obviously the gallery
brings other things to the table that I
would like. So eventually, maybe I'll
return to that idea but I thought you
know what, if I am still making money on
the few portraits that I have left from
that mirrored series, and I sold two big
ones in the summer that I–that you know,
was a huge relief and came in the nick
of time, and I thought ‘my god people love
these things’ [laughs]
 
877
00:44:06,810 --> 00:44:13,570
–‘what am i doing’ and–and once again–
is there something that I can paint? If
I'm going to paint for a living, is there
something I can paint where I'm not
sacrificing my integrity, and I'm
interested in the paintings, and I still
have time to pursue this work that is
more difficult, and more–and less
resolved and has more uncertain
directions. And interestingly, when I was–
when I've been painting these tiny
little fragments, they are very–like–
and you're sort of returning to nature–
they're like flowers and branches and
you know, this looks–it could be a
landscape. There's little feathers and
you know, fashion is so influenced by
nature–nature comes first and then
fashion’s influenced–well I've taken the
body out so I'm kind of left with all these
natural references, and that I would say
is my critique of this piece but it's a
little too landscape for me and I’ve lost
a more–a more clear reference to the
body. And I–Robert Birch, who is my
mutual friend with John Armstrong–he had a
show last summer about flower paintings
and we have been talking for the last
year about ‘can you make important flower
painting–can flower paintings be
interesting?’ and I have been sort of
obsessing about it conceptually and
intellectually I've been reading a lot and
I've been researching a lot of floral
paintings and interestingly there's sort
of been a renaissance of interest in
flower paintings in the last few years–
so there's actually been some important
exhibitions of artists like [Édouard] Manet,
Fantin-Latour, and others who have–who
have painted a lot–who focused on the
floral still life, and so I thought ‘you
know what,
flowers sell’ [laughs] I’m gonna try to do
something with flowers, and so I did. And,
what I realized was–going back to that
initial quote, the work is ultimately
still me and I–there's something in
the images–I have a couple more to
show you and then I'll be done–there's
something in these images that I feel
still hold the themes that interest me
and I feel like they might–they're
incredibly fun to
paint because the textures of flowers
are so diverse, and–like in that ornament
series where I wanted every layer to be
painted differently, I'm really exploring
the possibilities in each fragment no
matter how big or small with how to
paint the image so interpreting these
little images, you know, gives me a lot of
scope to play with but at the end of the
day they feel me and that makes me think
maybe they're a clue to something else
that will come down the line and I don't
know what that is yet, so I'm continuing
to make them–this–these are studio
shots, these are not professionally
photographed so things like all the–all the
diversity of blacks in the
middle you can't see but there’s–
there’s sort of a shimmer of darkness in
the centre. And this is the one I'm
working on right now–these are all sort of–
I'm still tweaking them so they're not
totally finished. This is a small one–I
actually painted this one for myself [laughs]
and every time I do that I of course have to
sell it because I need the money [scattered laughter]
–but technically this was one that I
personally loved and wanted to keep–we'll
see how that goes–and that's the scale
of it. So–so I guess just in conclusion,
you know, I have this–I know that for me the
diversity of my practice commercially
has not been a good idea. People who
focus on one thing and really–and it's
their thing, like I'm not saying it in a
cynical way, but people who have their
thing, they get better and better and
better and better at it and by the time
I've done five different bodies of work,
they're doing masterful things with this
idea that they've been working on for
ten years and I'm not a master of
anything because I keep trying out new
things, and my goal is to find a way to
show the coherence of–of that work and
at the same time make work that–that I
can sell and that I can pay for my
studio with [laughs] and–you know, I sacrificed a
lot to do this, I left a life–I–when I
see what my friends are doing–you know,
Nigel Wright who was part of the big
Harper scandal this year–he hired me at–
for my first law job. I worked for him,
and you know, these–Michael Wekerle, who’s
on Dragon's Den–I worked for him in
an investment bank, like I have this
weird shadow of the life I could have
had haunting me, sort of stalking me, and
now, you know, I hang out with people who
are younger than me and I have this life
of like a thirty year old and–and I'm
really happy and I think I feel like my
definition of success has become defined
by less and less and less, and having
less. I care less, my ambition is for the
work–it's not about sort of succeed–
having the respect from the art world
that I really wanted at the beginning,
and I feel like success for me is
continuing to be able to make the work
and being true to myself in the studio–
and balancing those two things is
sometimes challenging but hopefully–hopefully
I’ll find the right balance. So that’s it, thank you very much. [Applause]
>>Audience: Has your double life ever made its way into your work in
any way?
>>Amanda Clyne: In the–when I was at OCAD I did
some student work that was rooted in a
corporate life, but what I realized is I–
which is sort of the–for me the
femininity–people–I have had curators say
you know, ‘no one will curate you into a
show if you have a dress in your painting’
–and of course flowers are just
completely stupid–and everyone
dismisses the–the objects that actually–
sort of, feminine iconic objects that
interest me, and it was–this feels very
vulnerable to me. I would be much safer
dealing with all the corporate crap
that I lived with. I did a piece
particularly on 9/11–I lived in New
York at 9/11 and it was sort of a
catalyst for me quitting my job and it
was made out of pieces from my–legal
practice and from my life there and it
was sewn together with red thread. So yes–
but what I realized was I'm not as–I’m a
different–I’m really a different person
than I thought I was.
>>Audience: I'm just learning
about your interest in having a dialogue
with
the history of painting and whether or
not living in New York was part of your
sort of, acquaintance with the history of art, I mean they
have very rich museums, and you know, amazing examples of artists
who have excelled in the Western tradition–
>>Amanda Clyne: yeah I–I–one of the great gifts
of being a lawyer at an international
firm in New York was living downtown in
Manhattan–I could afford to live in the
East Village which is very chic and when
I had a few hours off which was rare, I
did go to all the galleries. I'm a bit
anti-social–I’m a bit of a recluse and–
going to the galleries, for me, I always
did by myself and they were very sort
of intimate experiences for me–and I
traveled a lot.
They sent me to Asia, I lived in
Singapore for almost a year, I went to
Europe, and I always looked as much as I
could. I think the Singapore
experience was one of the most
mind-blowing experiences I had–most of
my deals were in India, so I would
commute from Singapore to India at
various cities, and [exhales] I loved it. And–I–my
aesthetic felt–maybe the sort of Agnes
Martin–you can see my aesthetic is actually
quite minimalist ironically, and the
Asian aesthetic–even the hotels, like
everything was just so–it was before we
had boutique hotels and all the stuff
that I think has been imported now
into our culture–but at the time, it–I
felt like I had suddenly walked into my
aesthetic heaven. There was a museum in
Shanghai of ink scrolls and they're so
old and so delicate that the lights
aren't on and as you walk, you know, by
each piece the light sort of comes on
quietly and then you go to the next
piece and it goes off and I mean I just
want to cry, it's just so beautiful. So–so
that certainly influenced me greatly but
I'm a Western girl and I–the Western
paintings–I think for me the history–
the old paintings,
the old masters’ paintings were
not paintings that I connected to as a
young person. I loved Modern Art, that–
my mom had posters of that, you know–we
had David Hockney on the wall and Matisse
and Georgia O'Keeffe and I loved that
stuff, and it–I had to learn to like the old
masters in–in art school. There were a
few exceptions–Velázquez, Tiepolo,
Goya–one of my favourites–but, yeah–I–
I'm not sure how to answer your question
but to say that, for me the art is the
artist. I mean I don’t–I–to sort of
commune with the art that I love, I–I
look at art all the time and sort of
question what it means today and why
was it relevant then, why was it
perceived in that way then, why is it not
perceived that way now and why do I sort
of want to get inside it, and what
buttons is it pressing in me? It’s pretty
visceral–I mean it's not–I’m–
You know, I’m a verbal person, I love reading,
I love ideas, but I think one thing with
the flower paintings that I've had to
come to terms with is to not apologize
for the art that I love, and you know
having I think–I’m very critical of the
art world, sometimes alienating people
who are not connected to the art world
and this notion of accessibility is
somehow selling out or
you know not radical enough, not
revolutionary enough–but I have to say
you know, art meant so much to me before I
was an artist and I don't take that as a
small thing and for me, if my audience is
primarily non artists, but it genuinely
moves people and you know, I’m–I think I’m good with
that. I still–I mean I still have so much
respect for the ideas of art and I love
contemporary art so much and I certainly
have my heroes in the contemporary art
world–I have ambition for the work
because you know it's almost like you
have those painters on your shoulder
when you're painting, saying–‘Is that
all you got?’ you know. I saw the de
Kooning retrospective at the Met and the
thing that blew my mind was each room
was–basically a decade of work, and you
could have spent a week in each room and
each room really was so different like
he took such huge leaps in his work and
I–you know, if he had just stuck with one of
those rooms, maybe two–he would have been
what he is today–but there were like
seven, and I went with an artist friend of mine and
we just left thinking we have got to
work harder [laughter] like this is ridiculous.
It was so inspiring and, yeah it was very inspiring.
There's a standard obviously that sort of
is in my mind, but not in a arrogant way
that I think I'll ever paint like
Velázquez. [laughs]
Thank you very much. 
[Applause]
