We recently connected with Amy Ordoveza and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Amy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to study with many great teachers over the years. I was really lucky to have a great high school art teacher, Mr. Carmella, who taught us a lot about observational drawing. The first few months in his class felt like learning a whole new way to see the world. After high school, I studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where my experience was mixed. I was exposed to many different art forms and points of view and learned a lot about art history, which was important. I had some professors who were very helpful, but also others who were not supportive of my goals to learn to paint and draw in a realistic style. Fortunately I was able to take summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where I continued to develop my skills and heard about the MFA program at the New York Academy of Art, which I attended after MICA. The New York Academy was just the right school for me. The Academy’s structured curriculum and extremely knowledgeable faculty made it possible for me to learn to paint the way I wanted to.

I’ve also recently taken some online courses and workshops with still life painters whose work I admire. Two years ago I took Zane York’s: Still Life: Life and Death in the Balance Course, and last year I took Natalie Featherston’s Trompe l’oeil workshop. This spring I have been very grateful to receive a professional development grant from the Canada Council for the Arts that has made it possible for me to attend Carlo Russo’s Still Life Garden Intensive Course. This course focuses on 17th century Dutch approaches to still life painting, particularly on painting and composing with fruit, vegetables, and flowers; perishable items that require a different approach than longer lasting still life objects. It has been so valuable to learn from other artists whose working processes are a bit different from mine.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a visual artist with a studio practice rooted in drawing and painting. I carefully craft and arrange the delicate cut-paper plants, animals, and architectural elements that I depict in my detailed, imaginative still-life paintings. The fragility of the paper objects suggests impermanence while my close observation and meticulous handling of paint hint at their significance. Isolating elements of a scene and placing them within a still life signifies that the paintings represent a psychological space rather than the literal documentation of a place. Their careful selection and arrangement imply the presence of an unseen hand and mind. I am interested in how painting can evoke a sense of beauty and mystery present in ordinary surroundings and help the viewer see them in a new way through their transformation.

For several years I have been creating still life paintings that incorporate cut paper objects that I‘ve crafted myself. I began this body of work as I was in the process of a long distance move. I wanted to paint the home that I was leaving behind in a way that showed how it existed in my memory and imagination. I recreated my townhouse community as a chain of paper houses, the fragility of the object evoking a sense of impermanence and my careful handling of the paint evoking a sense of significance. Since then the series has expanded to include representations of plants, animals, and architectural elements from my memories of places that have been important to me. I have aimed to convey the emotional impact of those places through abstraction and emphasis, through the careful selection of details.

Now I am envisioning a new series of paintings and drawings that focuses on the juxtaposition of crafted paper objects with real-world objects that bring their own origins and histories with them. By contrasting thin, flat, delicate, cut paper objects with ordinary objects in a great variety of textures and colours, I will create compositions in which imagination meets lived experience and a world of thought interacts with the external world.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Artists need time to develop their work. Things that society can provide that give artists the flexibility to cut back on time spent doing other work and devote more time to creation include universal health care, and project grants that provide funding for time and materials to develop new art. Access to arts education in the schools is also very important for growing a culture that values the arts.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I haven’t been thinking very much about managerial and entrepreneurial philosophy lately. I’m in the beginning stages of developing a new body of work so at this point I’m concentrating on creating the art. I’ll be thinking more about getting it out into the world in a few months, when it is further along. I’ve been reading and thinking about the process of creating art and the lives of artists. Here are a few books about art that I’ve enjoyed over the past year and would recommend: Art is Life by Jerry Saltz, Magritte in 400 Images by Julie Waseige, and Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art by Robert Schindler, Bernd Ebert, and Anna C. Knapp.

I am also starting to think about returning to teaching art after taking a break from teaching for a few years to focus on my studio practice. Some resources that I would recommend for learning about the process of making art include Steve Chmilar’s Youtube channel where he posts some very nice demonstration videos about his own process, and The Academy of Realist Art Boston’s Youtube channel. There’s a very informative materials talk about oil painting by Julie Beck on their channel as well as some interesting art history lectures.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://amy.ordoveza.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amy_ordoveza/