Amanda Mears is a British-born, Los Angeles based painter and bookmaker. Before focusing on her art practice, Amanda filmed and directed factual television for the BBC, Discovery Channel, History Channel and many others. She was trained in film-making at the BBC in England and the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles. Her AFI film drama won several awards in Japan and Los Angeles. Amanda went on to study painting for three years at a traditional Atelier School in Los Angeles and at ‘Turps’ - Marcus Harvey’s London-based independent painting school. She was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship and the Walker/ Parker Memorial Fellowship by Claremont Graduate School and received her MFA from CGU in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in London and Los Angeles and is held in private and public collections including the Cedars Sinai Foundation.  

Amanda Mears worked as a documentary film-maker before earning her MFA from Claremont Graduate School. She makes paintings and books about climate-challenged wild spaces, connection and loss. Her paintings and sculptural books explore the idea of landscape as fragile, mediated, specific and intimate. Grounded in her documentarian’s practice of gathering and editing materials, Amanda’s process begins with drawing and photographing in nature. These gathered materials are reprocessed into paintings and books which investigate the powerful tension between the universal and the particular, and the real and the imagined. Amanda’s work engages with humans’ intertwined relationship with the natural world, investigating via materials and mark-making how we inscribe ourselves onto an idea of landscape.

Exhibition:

In The Dormant Splendor