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Amanda Laurel Atkins...

My paintings have always been a way to capture the things that I want. These things range from the superficial to the highly emotional, from dresses to loves, wallpapers to a someone. People and things who spend fleeting moments in my life are internalized as a feeling, and that feeling becomes a painting which represents a single moment, occurrence, encounter in a way that only I fully understand, and yet still manages to allude itself to viewers.

The women in my paintings are always set in the past, primarily mid-20th century. I have a particular fondness for this era: the clothes, the hair, the simplicity of the time. This fondness extends beyond the lifestyle of women of the past and reaches to a place of comfort. I take comfort in knowing that no matter what I am going through, be it heartbreak or success, there was a woman 60 years ago who, at one particular moment in her life, felt the exact same way.

The pieces in “Depending” draw much inspiration from the ocean and stars, especially how they were re-created as backdrops for early 1900s photography. I find the aesthetics of these old backgrounds so beautiful, and love what they were meant to say about the woman posing in front of them, how they were created to make her feel otherworldly. The installation is my personal take on this type of setting, the environments of my paintings brought to reality. Guests of the show are invited to place themselves in the setting and even be photographed there.
I have a penchant for groupings of words that are taken out of their context. Fragments of books, the tail-end of a line in a poem, and so on. Titles for my paintings seem to arrive in my mind as something already taken out of context. The title and image then come together and invite the viewer to elaborate on what they see, try to figure out the story behind the painting.

My images are here to give the viewers a story they can build themselves.

Ms. Atkins earned her B.F.A. from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. In addition to exhibiting regionally, her artwork has been featured as album art for the musical group Jerry Fish and The Mud Club.