Amy Rice
The prolific painter discusses human nature and Mother Nature in her latest work and upcoming exhibition
By Sheba White
Published: November 1st, 2006 | 11:16am
Amy Rice's work has been described as wistful, illustratively storybook, feminine and playful. The Minneapolis painter — who works primarily with found-object backgrounds (wood, canvas, and metal shards) and shapes her bucolic landscapes with stencil — couldn’t agree more, adding in an interview conducted via phone in mid-August "I think what I'm really trying to achieve is to evoke an emotion that's hard to describe, something like homesickness. But also joy — that feeling when you're holding something that belonged to a loved one, an ancestor that's long gone, and you find joy in owning that thing, but also this longing and sadness about it."
There is a sense of the melancholy in Rice's landscapes. Her pieces are populated with women and young girls caught in emotionally resonant expressions, gestures, and routines. But these portraits are so lush with saturated colors — vintage sage, pale yellow, and the most absorbing flat black — and have such beguiling imagery that it's easy to forget there's a narrative behind their feminine allure, and that Rice is drawing on thematic elements beyond mere illustration, beyond mere stenciling. "I'm very girly. I'm a girly girl. I like flowers and pink things and all that kind of thing. I think when people meet me, their first impression of my artwork is: 'Oh there's a really happy person, someone who finds beauty in everything.' But if you look a little deeper, you'll find that it's not always that way. I'm not always that happy. There's a little bit of longing behind it. And I haven't necessarily embraced all the girly girl of me."
Compounding this perception is that, in most of Rice's pieces, there is a strong pastoral sensibility: flowering trees, ripe fruit, and swirls of insects. Rice is quick to note that these motifs stem from her childhood fascination with the relationship between the land and its people. "I grew up on a farm — just that whole Midwestern sense of the seasons, things exploding with life. And that whole cycle, that lushness — I love that. I'm just so inspired by that. It's really emotional for me. I think many people who live in the Midwest, and who live in a climate where the seasons change, and they change dramatically, get to their mid-30s and start to associate different weather, flowers, and seasons with different emotions and experiences from the past."
Rice began painting these landscapes as a means to record her life as an organic farmer in Wisconsin, but soon found that the pieces she was painting in her spare time sold more than her produce. She sold the farm, moved back to Minneapolis, and began painting full time while teaching at Spectrum, an art-based program for adults surviving mental disabilities.
Since then, she has shown in gallery spaces both in the Midwest and in Europe, but the thematic element of the Midwest continues to fascinate her. "I'm doing a show on barn boards and barn shingles and just pieces of my grandfather's barn," Rice noted, "All the imagery is hollyhocks and women embroidering, just things that I remember from my childhood on the farm. It's more emotional, I think, for so many Midwestern urban-dwellers like myself. Even if they didn't grow up on a farm, they had an uncle who had a farm. So many people share this experience with me. And they have this kind of wistful longing for that family farm, but really feel this disconnectedness from that. It's something they're missing that they never really got to touch."
In her upcoming show, One Hundred Year Round Trip at the Bluebottle Art Gallery in Seattle (Nov. 1-31), this connection to the land is the focal point of the work, with an emphasis on the historical labor-organizing practices of the weavers who made the shingles, and who, she noted, were some of the earliest labor activists in America. The show also focuses on the historical aspects of the shingles themselves. "One day we discovered that the shingles had originally come from Seattle," she noted, "so that 100 years ago, they had been made in Seattle, shipped on a train, came to Wisconsin, became part of my grandfather's barn, and then 100 years later when they ripped them off the barn, they sent them to me in Minneapolis. I made art out of them. And then, unbeknownst to me what their origin was, I shipped them back to Seattle. Who would think a shingle would be so interesting?"
Rice is particularly excited about this event, mostly because it's her first solo show outside of the Midwest, but also because the pieces in and of themselves show a connection to the land that clarifies for her the reason to make art. "My work has been described as decorative. I don't like that. I'm not toile painting. But I guess I can see why people think that if they don't have those kinds of emotional responses to seasons, or farms, or different fruits. The biggest thing I'm working on right now is to be able to evoke that emotion beyond people who live here. However, I do feel like whatever you need to do to express yourself, whatever that material — even if it's glitter and macaroni noodles — if it helps you express what you want to say, then you should be able to use it."
One Hundred Year Round Trip is showing at the Bluebottle Art Gallery & Store in Seattle, November 1-31. For more information call 206-325-1592 or visit Amy Rice's webpage Amy Rice's webpage.
Sheba White is a Minneapolis writer living and working in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Venus Zine, New City, and Reservoir.
Issue #35
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