Sara Amos

I chose printmaking, perhaps because I came from a very artistic family and it was the only arena in which someone was not working. My grandfather was a well-known Australian painter, so I came to painting through the backdoor through printmaking, but what I found there was an amazing, expressive art form that was very flexible, that also had a lot of history to it. I was very attracted to the technique and to the craftsmanship of making prints and plates. I’m a little bit of an oxymoron of a printmaker. I really don’t like multiples, even though essentially that is what printmaking is all about. I like to work with multiple plate mono printing, where I have many different plates to create a very rich, illustrious, somewhat oil painting surface. Many people have told me that my prints really don’t look like traditional mono prints, because I layer and layer, sometimes up to twenty-seven passes of color, to create the original image.  I am now finding that I like to do a lot of handwork over the top because I can’t use petroleum products. I have to use water based, so I am marrying the two - gouache and watercolor- with oiled based materials. In my paintings I am using everything from wax to shoe polish, and I am inscribing and inscripting and burying images. My work is very much interested in archaeology or anthropology. I love the fact that I am creating, if you like, historical text or maps, making marks. I like the idea that I am creating daily maps or testaments to a life being lived and that in the mark-making is where I am laying the history of my life, if you like, daily journals. So there is a lot of reference to maps, and there are lots of  marks and dotted lines to depict the way home or to lead you  somewhere else. I believe this is a life-long process that I am involved in, paintings and image making.

As an artist I also collect Indian miniatures, and I am very interested in the ornateness of the baroque, I guess, and so that very beautiful detail with the white gouache as overlay and the opalescence, I find that very intriguing. I am also very interested in New Guinea artifacts and have buried ancestral or ceremonial masks into the work, or fertility gods. I am very interested in those particular areas which are coming up through the work at the moment. I also use a lot of vessels in my work. A vessel to me is a cup that is full of ideas or like a floating ship. I might say the vessel is the eye of the work that is watching everything that is presently going around.

I find that printmaking and painting relate to each other very much so. I really believe that the printing is the most direct link between painting and drawing, and it’s a great way to work out ideas, somewhat more spontaneously than the paintings. I feel I am much more concrete. There is a concrete sensibility to them, whereas the prints have a spontaneity or a looseness to them, which is particular to the printmaking medium. So that I am married to both mediums.

Sara Amos. Artist/Image maker.  Born:  Australia.  Lives:  Johnson, Vermont, U.S.A.  Ms. Amos is the Master Printmaker at Vermont Studio Press, where distinguished artists are invited to work in collaboration with her.  Sara Amos’s own work is exhibited internationally.