S. Champlain Street Homes Wood Print

For the last several years I have been working on an opus of watercolors of landmarks in Burlington, Vermont, historic and modern buildings that exemplify our city’s character, vision, and aspirations. To me, buildings are a community’s portrait.

This painting is part of a series with a slightly different slant: watercolors of a neighborhood lost to urban renewal in the 1960s. It gives form to memories and to reflections on the impact of our decisions for decades to come. Through this work I hope to contribute to the dialog about who we are as a community and who we want to become.

This is a cluster of homes typical of this hard working neighborhood where houses were divided into apartments for multi-generational families.

Amanda Amend captures the mystery behind the everyday in luminous watercolor. Often described as atmospheric and ethereal, the subtle qualities of her work are balanced by a powerful, disciplined use of color, values, and compositional choices that reflect unique perspectives. The artist recently discovered her passion for watercolor, and she is largely self-taught. Her educational background is in music and linguistics rather than in studio arts, however those disciplines have given her the analytical and practice-oriented frameworks from which to master watercolor's difficult techniques. Further, the structures of language and music provide a conceptual basis for understanding visual composition, and these careers have taken her...