Amy Englebrecht is 12-year resident of the Park City area, and is a mixed-media painter, who recently was able to participate in this year’s Kimball Arts Festival (very cool). She and her husband live in a remote cabin at 8000 feet, and she takes inspiration for her paintings from her closest neighbors – moose, elk, owls and coyotes.
Amy grew up on a farm in northern Michigan and always had a lot of animals around – cattle, horses, dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, raccoons, and mice. She had a soft spot for every stray and rescue that crossed her path, and she shared that it gave her mother fits. Amy ended up going to college at MIT and has a Ph.D. in geochemistry from Berkeley. She was a scientist at the national lab in Livermore for years before moving to Park City. Being a busy professional in her 30s, she mostly consumed other peoples’ art, but started doing carpentry. In her 40s though, Amy picked up a sketchbook again, and her interest in painting took off.
Art was always something that interested Amy, starting with charcoal drawings entered into local fairs. But she was never formally trained and has developed her skills and techniques by trying anything that sounds fun. She uses acrylics, oils, spray paint, and pigmented plaster the most, but has also used natural clay, charcoal, and botanicals that she finds on their property. Amy is heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, and her painting style is very intuitive and gestural. She uses anything for mark making– brushes, rollers, knives, sticks, even her bare hands, and her resulting paintings are full of texture as well as color. This results in highly engaging works that invite the viewer to explore the art from varying distances and angles.
She has maintained her carpentry skills, now employing them in creating cradled birch panels for paintings, and of course, making her own frames.
What Amy finds special about painting is the process. She feels that making her art is joyful and challenging, and works in her studio every day. Amy shared, “At some point in nearly every piece I’ll look at it and think, ‘Well, this has just gone over the edge of chaos.’ But then I’ll add a couple more swipes and it all comes together. It’s sort of magical. I think my pieces are fun, and my litmus test for being finished is whether they make me giggle. And if other people see that and connect with that fun and joy, all the better.”
Amy really takes much of her inspiration from those animal neighbors of hers, absorbing the moment of excitement when she sees them grazing across the woods, or perhaps seeing a mama moose and babies laying down for a nap in the shade. She has found that her color inspiration happens a little further afield, almost like osmosis from her travels. For instance, after visiting Thailand last year, Amy came back and this amazing pink had started to crop up in her paintings. As she was looking through her photos from Chiang Mai she remembered all the hibiscus that grows there, an amazing pink that crops up on temple grounds and vacant lots everywhere. That pink had lodged somewhere in her brain and ultimately, in her art.
Amy’s favorite quote mirrors her work:
“To be free from convention is not to spurn it, but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.” — Alan Watts