Amy Todman is an artist and writer from Scotland, now based in Lebanon.
Her painting and writing unfold aspects of place and environment. Through a deeply introspective, almost meditative, daily painting practice she probes her relationship with the world, a deep attention to the subtleties of light, sound and air, human and non-human company, creating the conditions for a painterly examination of the play of internal and external worlds seen through juxtapositions of everyday and imagined objects. For Todman, ‘painting is now a question, not anything else’. One central question asked by her paintings is the way in which one entity affects another, and how this affect can be amplified. She explores the rendering of sensitive experience; how the gentle play of a breeze on an arm can become a moment of intense emotion, wind and arm both active agents in an intimate, unfolding drama.
Her poetry is another act of listening, in which, she considers, her work is to allow words to become as spare, as still, as they were in the moment they first arrive in her thought. Such quiet requires a deep attention to the inner world and, in order to traverse the transition between first voice and page, to the connection between external and internal realities.
The relation between painting and poetry is unforced, yet clear, and often she writes about painting. Such a practices extends to an occasional sculptural aspect, in which small, handmade objects become actors in her paintings and poems, their creation a way to distance herself from the categories of thing or feeling that the mind imposes, and to return, through layers of descriptive practice, to a state of unknowing which, she feels, brings greater clarity to actual, lived experience.
The allowance of such emotional connections is at the core of Todman’s work, explored through the formal considerations of light and colour as well as the subtle, awkward and tender interactions of her at times mundane subject matter. The painter herself is often a subject, and at heart her artwork explores the moments of relation between one life and another, one form of life and another; the shift of light as it touches a pinecone, the arm span of a person resting by a window, the canvas held in front of a body as another sleeps nearby.
For Todman, painting is part of the world and paintings paint us as we paint them. Through the painted world we can become aware of a doubling that hides less, is more transparent, and through this open quality can begin to experience a simple joy at the acceptance of our connection with the world, our many energetic unions.
She is represented by Saleh Barakat Gallery/Agial Art Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon
All images and text on this website are copyright Amy Todman unless otherwise stated
