This week’s featured artist is Kansas City artist Amanda Jolley.
I first met Amanda at Art Unraveled in Phoenix in 2015 when we both taught classes at the annual retreat. Our mutual friend and last week’s featured artist, Erin Keane insisted that we meet since she knew we were both going to be in the same place at the same time. Amanda and I would be Facebook friends for a few years after, but I was able to eventually travel to Kansas City and have a wonderful experience teaching at her home studio, aptly named Studio Joy.
Amanda wasn’t always an artist. She left a career as a corporate accountant in the 1990s and began exploring the world of mixed media art before settling into encaustic. She often creates bright abstract pieces from encaustic wax exploring how patterns found in everyday life connect to patterns of the brain and the subconscious.
Her experimentation of pattern has also led her to paper folding where she creates complex folded tessellations as well as origami forms. Sometimes these folded creations are unfolded them to reveal the the patterns of creases left in the paper. It was probably natural that the encaustic and the paper folding should come together at some point. Painted representations of origami forms and patterns often appear in her encaustic work, and she also embeds folded paper forms into the wax of other pieces to physical merge the paper with the wax.
Some of her recent work has been inspired by her family, and she has used her grandson’s drawings as the impetus for work, as well as incorporating actually wheat from her grandfather’s last wheat harvest.
Along with creating her work, Amanda has exhibited widely around the Kansas City area, but also nationally. She has also taught a wide variety of workshops throughout the country, though now that she has her own studio, she focuses on teaching there and bringing in several guest artists each year to teach workshops.
As if making her own work, exhibiting, teaching, and running a production company with her husband Scott wasn’t enough, Amanda has teamed up with fellow artist Sue Stover to create Two Artists Travel. With this venture, Amanda and Sue create travel adventures for small groups of creatives that will be memorable and inspirational to the individuals. So far they have traveled to Gujarat, India and Paris, France. Unfortunately, a trip this year to Bali had to be cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, but they’ll be traveling back to India in 2021.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing Amanda’s art and adventures over the past five years, and I hope to go back to Kansas City to teach in the near future. I hope that you enjoy Amanda’s work as much as I do!
Find Amanda online:
www.amandajolley.com
www.facebook.com/AmandaJolley.Artist
www.instagram.com/amandajolley
www.twoartiststravel.com