Anthony Amies: Breaking Waves

The Lost Landscapes of England

Anthony Amies’ paintings assert a classical conception of painting. From the mid 1970s, the British artis pursued a radical counter-concept to the art of his time with a stylistically peculiar landscape painting. They are calm and enigmatic pictures that do without any scandal. In large-scale drawings and oil paintings, he plays with the “blot” technique: Amies abstracts the landscapes to convey an idea rather than a realistic image. The reduction to land and sea is a reflection on England and  the loss of its individual landscapes to the monotony of industrial and urban proliferation and sprawling housing estates. In this idiosyncrasy ― the assertion of the genre of landscape painting and in the painterly quality of the works as a contribution to the assertion of painting in art―lies the importance of this English painter.

About the Artist:

Anthony Amies (1945, Norwich–2000, London) was educated at Great Yarmouth College of Art in the 1960’s and later at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. Refusing to conform to the zeitgeist, he found his visual language inspired by Cozens’ blot technique in the early 1970s, and would persist with it until his untimely death in 2000. Amies received the Arts Council Award in 1977 and worked teaching art in Camden from 1973–1995 at the Camden Institute and the Camden School of Art.