Amy Bernstein

October 28, 2019

Amy Bernstein is an artist heavily invested in the process of painting. She makes paintings on large canvases, composed of lyrical brushstrokes on a painstakingly smooth layer of white gesso. For her, process takes precedent over concept. "You need the time to spend sitting & thinking," she says, "and you need this in tandem with the actual hands-on making." Bernstein has developed her own vernacular of color and brushstrokes and sees her work as creating a language. She renders her paintings entirely in oil and claims "oil paint can do anything, it's such an amazing recorder of time, or of a moment."

From the Mast, oil on canvas

An Intellect’s Love, oil on canvas

In An Intellect’s Love we see a collection of shapes and brushstrokes, each surrounded by white space. There is an ochre blob, blue streaked light lavender, some marbled yellow and orange, and many other discrete shapes, all suspended in the white void of gesso. The specificity of the marks serve as an analog to the particularities of an intellectual dialogue and that the shapes do not touch hints at the difficulty, or even impossibility of understanding or being understood.

Circle of Elders, oil on canvas

Men of Honor Where are You Now, oil on canvas

Men of Honor Where are You Now is anchored by a dominant yellow blob with an interior of striated ochre. The other shapes are drawn to it as if it has its own gravity. The thickly painted black shape in the bottom of the painting is vaguely goat-like and cuts through the whiteness like a void. The painting could easily be taken as a lamentation of the times we're in, where a fascist orangeish blog sucks up every bit of media attention while formerly honorable men stand by.

Lovers Race, oil on canvas

We Are Creatures of the Wind, oil on canvas

In We are Creatures of the Wind, the paint shapes seem to be gently blowing across the canvas, many of them superimposed on others. The piece has a gravity-defying levity as the title suggests. In fact, Bernstein often works flat on the ground to avoid gravity creeping into the paintings.

Amy recently began a one-year MFA program at the Ruskin School of Art, part of the University of Oxford. She says, "The main goal for me is to see how far I can push my own work." Follow her journey on instagram! @paintstein