Amy Spitzer

As a child, I was rather shy and solitary and lived in my imagination. I fantasized about the world in rain puddles and beyond the reflection in my bedroom mirror. As I grew up and moved into the real world, my artwork developed from my need to explore my feelings in both worlds.

As a young adult, my vision for my painting was to restore the third dimension to the painting space, and, to accomplish this I have focused on learning and then using the old master methods of indirect painting. My learning in the area is all self-taught through reading, observation and experimentation. Much of 20th century painting had been devoted to emphasizing the two-dimensional space of the picture plane and when I first began to paint, abstraction was still in vogue. Although there were practicing representational painters, for example Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter among many others, the space in their paintings is still shallow, lacking air, light. I have long studied the work of Rembrandt and Italian Renaissance painters among others toward my goal. At the same time, I have also been a devoted student of Cezanne, Bonnard and Matisse. What I have realized is that my vision is to create a painting that exists as a melding of a three dimensional space and a two-dimensional construct (real and imagined worlds) using a variety of means such as line, overlapping planes, value, color relationships, atmospheric perspective, patterning, shape-state, the properties of oil paint (transparent vs. opaque, texture) to name just a few. My vision can never be completely realized, but it is an id

Amy Spitzer is an award-winning painter and resident of Evanston, Illinois. She has worked as an artist for 40 years after studying art at schools including Wellesley College and the School of the Art Institute and privately with artists Richard Yarde and Margaret Phillips. She has exhibited in various national shows juried by notable artists and curators of museums such as the Hirshhorn.