Artospective: Paintings by Amanda Greive from America.

Requiem for the Obedient.

An Interview with Amanda Greive.

Who and where are you from?

My name is Amanda Greive and I am from central Illinois. I studied art at the University of Illinois in Springfield.

How you got into this?

Though I come from a family that is very musically and artistically inclined, I originally went to school to become an epidemiologist. After graduating from school, I took a job but still felt unfulfilled. A little over 10 years ago, I decided to take a drawing class at my local community college and instantly felt that making art was what I was meant to do and I've been doing it ever since.

What is your driving force?

I have always been interested in the human condition--why we feel the way we do, how we address and cope with feelings of loneliness and isolation. I'm also interested in how this concept intersects notions of gender equality and stereotypes inherent in gender.

What kind of work you do and why?

In my art-making process, the portrayal of relationships symbolically through the interplay of objects and the female figure has been a priority. I have found that traditional representation has, thus far, best suited me in my exploration of this topic, and my imagery references both classical and contemporary symbolism and iconography. While my paintings are singular to my own experiences, it is my hope that they also have a universality to them, wherein the viewer is able to relate his or her own relationships to the portrayals, making the act of viewing the painting an experience in its own right. As such, this body of work serves as an exploration of the human condition, that irreducible part of humanity that connects all of us. We all inherently have a propensity to search for purpose, a sense of curiosity, a desire to be loved and to give love, an acute acknowledgement of the inevitability of isolation, and a fear of death.

The primary motivation behind my work is to tease out the nuanced emotions embedded within the human condition and to confront isolation and anxiety born of gender-based stereotypes. The floral element of each painting symbolically draws attention to femininity as a source of possible societal, emotional and personal conflict for the figures portrayed. Too, each work is painted photorealistically, so instinctively there is an emphasis on technique. I look to comment on the contradiction between creating realistic imagery and portraying emotional rawness, as well as the uncompromised truth in the imagery portrayed versus its symbolic ambiguity.