"Today, Clyne is most influenced by the fashion industry and the images of perfection and beauty it perpetuates." Lara Cory article, Escape Into Life blog

This was written last week as part of a beautiful review of my work by Lara Cory. But this particular line has been haunting me since I first read it. Although seeing a critique of the fashion industry's obsession with perfection is an entirely fair reading of my work, it is not what influences my work. It is not what inspires me to make the work.

So what does inspire me?

Fundamentally, I am inspired by images and questions of why we want to look at them, of what desires they satisfy, feed, create. I'm inspired by the different ways we experience images -- does the meaning or role of the image change if we see it on the screen of our laptop, or in a glossy magazine? Does it matter if it is experienced as a huge painting amidst the lush display of an old European museum, or as a photograph imprisoned behind glass on the white walls of a gallery? The experience of images is never determined solely by the picture itself. It is an experience of the senses, of memory, of fantasy -- ultimately, of desire. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes in his book What do Pictures Want?: "...the question of desire is inseparable from the problem of the image, as if the two concepts were caught in a mutually generative circuit, desire generating images and images generating desire." (p 58)

So if images and their relationship to desire are my subject matter, then why do I choose to paint portraits? There seems no better object of display to inspire viewers to look than the human face, an object to which we are more highly sensitive to than any other object. My paintings anthropomorphize the image, presenting portraits not of women, but of images. And by using the face, the viewer is confronted with an unsettling and seductive exchange when, as James Elkins writes, "the object stares back". In fact, it is one of the greatest moments in the process of painting for me -- when I step back to look at my painting and the tiny fragments of eyes merge together and my painting looks back at me.

And then there's fashion. Why do I steal from the pages of fashion magazines to make my paintings? At its core, fashion, like images, is about desire and illusion. To put it simply, for me, fashion is the embodiment of image-making.

I hope that clarifies things, although inspiration is of course never finite, and not always easy to articulate. I should have done a better job at clarifying my influences to Lara Cory. What others view as the most interesting aspect of your work is not always the same thing that motivated the work.

It takes me back to the moment I knew I wanted to be an artist. I had quit my job as a lawyer and moved out west, and began taking basic art classes at the local art college. My first class was a course on principles of design and composition. Our final assignment was to create a self-portrait using the principles we had learned. When it came to the day to present the work, our instructor informed us that the person sitting next to us (ie. a random stranger) would present our work. Whatever we had to say about ourselves had to have been said in the work itself. When the student next to me presented my work, she said not only the things that I had hoped the work would convey, but so much more -- and all of her insights were entirely accurate descriptions of me. The work had said more than I had ever intended, had been more revealing than I ever imagined. I was hooked.

Self-Portrait, collage, Amanda Clyne, 2002

Now, as an artist, I struggle to contend with what I hope to express through the work and what others glean from it. Is your work about what you say it is, or is it about what others see in it? I think it is unavoidably and necessarily both.