Amy Shackleton, a Canadian visual artist, infuses nature into the urban jungle. But what is most unique about her work is a complete absence of human life…it is only buildings, trees, water, and mountains. As wallspacegallery.ca puts it, “Shackleton’s work explores the conflicting relationships between humanity and the environment by depicting an uncertain future where cities blend with nature.”
Shackleton creates her art without using a conventional paintbrush. Instead, she applies the paint bottles directly onto the canvas by squeezing the paint out on the canvas and allowing gravity to do its work. As the liquid paint trickles down, she rotates the canvas to navigate the dripping paint and layers it, using his immense power of imagination. The artist’s website states, “The architectural aspects are highly controlled while the natural elements embody the spontaneous liquid impulse. Shackleton’s work wrestles with these opposing forces, just as her own optimism wrestles with reality.”
Shackleton, born in Canada, was always passionate about art. So, it was not surprising that she enrolled at York University in Toronto, Canada, and graduated with an Honors Degree in Fine Arts. She started painting using only the paint bottles and created her unique art that soon got noticed. Her art displays opposing forces, that is, control versus spontaneity in technique and architecture versus nature in her subject matter.
Todd Tremeer, a curator, states on wallspacegallery.ca, “Notably absent in all Shackleton’s paintings are people, traffic, and other living presences. Absence leaves space for projection; space, scale, and time are ambiguous, and incongruencies go unnoticed.” Another curator, Matthew Ryan Smith, states, “Although Shackleton’s paintings are intended to be designs for quotidian urban agriculture of the future, many paintings could also be perceived as jarringly atrophic.”
Currently working from her studio in Oshawa in Ontario, Canada, Shackleton has hundreds of her paintings in private and public collections that include THEMUSEUM, Museum of Dufferin, Colart Collection, Facebook Canada, and the University of Cincinnati. For her, no size is too large. At National Tour in 2017/18, she displayed a 53-foot (16.15 meters) interpretive panorama of Canada.
Shackleton has made a niche in the art world and is an active member of the Board of Directors at the Visual Arts Center of Clarington in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada. She has also been actively involved as a guest speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit and the University of Cincinnati. Her work finds mentioned in Magenta Magazine, Huffington Post, Luxe Magazine, SCOPO Magazine, and a few others.
Amy Shackleton
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