No Need To Surrender

Limited Edition Print by Amy Hoedemakers
30cm x 30cm
Edition of 100

I walk, I run... I’m adrift. Then I come back, come back home. This is my land, my rivers, my mountains, my skies. I can breathe here, I’m home.

Amy Hoedemakers graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology and has exhibited in solo and group shows within New Zealand and Ireland. Her work is held in private and public collections within New Zealand, Ireland, England and Australia. Her painting 'Waiting' was featured on the month of March in 'Craigs Investment Partners Calendar, 2015' for emerging and emerged artists and more recently she was a finalist for the ZAFAA18 Awards (Zonta Ashburton Female Art Award 2018).

Based in Oxford, where she currently works from her home studio, working towards a new body of work. There is a strong sense of poignancy and beauty to her paintings, her work has many layers to it and is more appreciated with close-up viewing. Of late my work has become more landscape based and surprisingly I have come back to explore concepts that I was looking at when I first started painting. I use sketches, titles, words, memories and photos as reference points for beginnings, but mostly I just immerse myself in the landscape. I draw on the emotional response that I want to resonate in the paintings, working rapidly on many different sized canvases at the same time. It’s the process of painting that I love, time slides past. I take off paint, re- apply, step back, look, paint more........and this process continues, I never tire of it.

My approach to painting has a formal element as well. I look at paintings in terms of colour, form and composition and consistently question that these aspects are working within the painting. My paintings are structured around themes of; emotional points of departure, family and dreams. There are many overlapping connections to these aspects within my work and I use landscape, colours and titles to portray these concepts. Sometimes the subject matter is just landscape and although it can be recognised as landscape, it has an abstract quality to it.