Born
1964, Cartersville, Georgia, USA
Education
Bachelor of Arts, Spanish: Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, 1987. 79 hours toward an additional, interdisciplinary degree in International Relations; emphases in Political Science, International and US Foreign Policy, Global Challenges, and Latin American Studies
Artistic Education
Self-taught
Description
Media: Amy creates in the following art media: painting, photography, writing, and music.
Style: Hoskins paints expressively, figuratively and representationally. She has several series of paintings at this time, several of them active. Amy paints in the abstract and representationally. Her photographs have a sense of the painterly in the abstract, and sensuality in the representational landscape.
Her painting began in 1993, as a way to express herself, because she was experiencing chronic facial and jaw pain at the time. As the physical pain healed, her paintings became a way to explore emotions over the years, both the sublime and excruciating.
Amy’s photographs range in content from abstract close-ups of industrial metal, machines and glass -- to erotic close-ups of the plant world – to studies of architecture in various cities, and vintage cars. She also captures natural landscapes, continuing the themes of the forest, trees, rocks and water that she explores with her paintings.
Influences: Amy was influenced by Matisse and Picasso as a young child in the sixties, excited especially by their use of shapes and color, and Matisse’s paper cuttings, including “Mermaid and Parakeet.” Sixties Pop art also made a big impression on her growing up. She also is influenced by El Greco and Francisco Goya, Salvador Dali, Remedios Varo, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Inspiration: Hoskins knows that all artists seek to respond to the way they feel about the world around them. Amy was hugely inspired and intrigued by the subtropical natural world around her growing up in northwest Georgia. However, she also saw the blight of increasing development before she left home for college, and then in college learned of worldwide environmental threats as part of her studies in International Relations. For these reasons, she relates strongly to wild places on the Earth and seeks them out in her paintings and photographs, in the abstract and the representational.
Nature in all its forms inspires Amy more than anything else, because it is simultaneously pure, chaotic, orderly and fascinating. She seeks out a sense of the primal and wild in her work, as something that is rare and endangered in herself and the world around her. It is something pure and not to be feared.
She believes that all forms of matter contain some form of life, a typical perspective for a Buddhist such as herself. Her studies of Buddhism, creative visualization and meditation deepen this exploration of wonder and fascination, and she seeks a contemplative arts approach to all of her work, as a way of centering, editing, and transforming herself and her art.
Resume and references available on request, to amyhoskinscc@gmail.com. 
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