Amy Bartlett Wright
Amy has worked for thirty five years as a professional artist, as a muralist and natural science illustrator. She specializes in portraying animals in their environments in large and small scale that create a sense of space and dimension. She enjoys exploring the woods and shores of Rhode Island where she lives and works. Amy received a BA in Scientific Illustration from University of Maryland in 1980. While at UM, she worked as an illustration intern at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian in the Departments of Botany and Entomology. She furthered her studies in painting and drawing at Rhode Island School of Design where she earned a Certificate in Scientific and Technical Illustration in 1990 and is now part of the RISD Continuing Education Faculty. When Amy is outside, she feels calm and connected to something beyond herself. Nature has been her place of comfort and inspiration as it is for many of us. She explores this relationship in her art, as she has for much of her life. As a young person, she explored the fields, woods and streams of her grandmother’s farm in Talbot County, Maryland. Amy found fossils and arrowheads along the Choptank River and noticed birds, insects and native plants that live among us. These were the moments that shaped her passion to show the outdoors and its beauty. She often ventures with her paints to the woods, marshes and shorelines when the light is good. Amy finds plein air painting to be essential training for realistic landscape painting at any scale. Outside, where breezes blow and the light constantly changes, she works more quickly and decisively than in the studio. What she is looking for is a gesture, the essence of the place. And through expecting more with less, she presses herself to construct a painting with simplicity and brevity. While she tries to maintain that freshness she achieves in plein air painting, her studio work yields deeper, more developed finished paintings in a combination of realism and expression. Amy began her career as a scientific illustrator in 1980 and have illustrated over sixty-five books. Amy has used her skills as an illustrator to paint large format murals for zoos, aquariums, nature centers and museums and public arts commissions. Her paintings act as background scenery or as exhibits themselves, in their accurate portrayal of animals in habitat. Amy is a member of Society of Animal Artists, Oil Painters of America and Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. She’s had her first solo show in 2013 at the Connecticut Audubon Society’s Grassland Conservation Center in Pomfret, Connecticut.