Richard Amend's recent work is an evolution of an extensive career as a production designer in the film business. Accepted to the California Institute of the Arts Graduate Program as a conceptual artist in 1971, Amend promptly rebelled by concentrating on painting. In the eighties, his career in film led to extensive travel, scouting locations. In the necessary process of photographing sites for various projects, he found a new direction for painting.
Using the camera allows him the opportunity to use a cool eye when choosing the image.
He strives to capture a singular moment, a stillness, a particular quality of light in his process. The camera also makes decisions.
Amend uses the format of landscape as a point of departure to render mysteriously radiant abstractions of nature. Lush canopies of trees, foliage illumined against the shimmering sky, and night scapes resplendent with ethereal light are his beguiling subject matter. He skillfully blends unabashed pictorialism with design devices to create a highly saturated, stylized approach to the plein air tradition.
These are not nostalgic landscapes. Though landscape painters like Winslow Homer and Maynard Dixon inspire him, there is no attempt to mimic a style. His swift and skillful use of his materials delivers images captured at the moment, before or after action. There is no hero. These are intensely observed yet detached views of moments in psychological time.
His work is included in many public collections including the City of Ventura Municipal Art Collection, the Toyota World Financial Headquarters, Douglass Aircraft, Atlantic Richfield, Security Pacific Bank, JBL and the Inner City Mural Project in Los Angeles. An extensive exhibition history, with many solo exhibitions from Los Angeles to New York and Italy, includes the Carnegie Art Museum in 2004 with a catalogue of his works accompanying the show.
He is a board member of the Ojai Studio Artists and serves both the public and private sector in exhibition design and installation of fine art.
A successful career as a production designer for commercials has awarded him several awards, notably the CLIO in 1995 and the AICP/MOMA in 1994. As a production designer for film, his projects include DOA, directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel and Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue, directed by Zalman King. Richard's latest film project to date is the trailer for the upcoming film, The DaVinci Code.
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