Amy Casey is a painter based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her paintings are very illustrative in nature. She normally creates surreal urban landscapes, with floating houses, long exaggerated buildings on stilts, and twisting roads. Most of her paintings are in acrylic, and I really like how the flat colors work in her compositions. Amy says she likes to illustrate the nervous state of the world by showing these suspended homes with wires and streets gnarled around them. I think this works very well while creating a feeling of tension. But at the same time, I also think her painting seem playful, because the setting is so unreal, and the colors also remind me of the way children's books are illustrated. Sometimes the homes and buildings look like figures, and even seem expressive sometimes. If you look at some of her other paintings, they tend to be chaotic and seemingly unorganized. However, I thought this particular piece was beautiful.
http://www.amycaseypainting.com/
The houses here are cool because they almost remind me of balloons. It seems like there is some subtle commentary going on here about the American Dream and owning a home.
ReplyDeleteWhile a lot of people seem to discourage floating images, the starkness of the background in this piece really works. While the floating houses are quite jumbled together, the vines/branches(???) seem to be able to hold such a heavy collection of objects. I think this may be because the lack of background makes them seem so high above any sight of land. It's as if it's situated in the middle of a cloud.
ReplyDeleteI've seen some of her work before (this one specifically: http://www.amycaseypainting.com/images/anchored_sm.jpg ) and I really like the subject matter of her paintings.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the houses on stilts create tension; they look like they are about to topple over. The perspective of the houses works very well, despite the fact the perspective is not perfect.
I think the perspective being off actually pushes the feeling that the houses might be floating rather than precariously perched on stilts. Something about the lighting also seems to make it seem more etherial like it's floating up in the clouds.
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