Aimee Blackledge

Aimee paints bold abstract forms with dynamic and varied lines. Her initial process involves listening to hypnotic and immersive electronic music to induce deep-level daydreaming. Listening to music while daydreaming is part of Aimee’s daily routine. As the waves of repetitive chords wash over her, she feels an automatic compulsion to move and make quick intuitive marks and lines that sweep across the paper or canvas. She feels that these marks are her in essence – raw, energetic, vibrant and expressive – the unmistakable evidence of her physical presence in that one moment.

Working mostly with mixed media, Aimee enjoys the diversity of textures she can create over multiple layers. She uses acrylic, oil pastels, charcoal, sumi ink, watercolours and oil sticks on canvas and paper. She often uses harmonious colours because they invite prolonged looking and are sophisticated, yet playful. She especially enjoys working on paper and feels it strikingly highlights the subtle and dense mark-making and expressive brushstrokes she makes.

Aimee rarely plans her works in detail beforehand. Instead, she allows her paintings to develop over several sessions. When working with paper, she briskly adds transparent layers of colour, followed by vigorous mark-making over several layers. If she is working on canvas, Aimee makes more precise shapes and areas of colour over several layers, transforming her initial marks and lines into more defined, solid and graphic shapes. As the layers build up over sessions, an overall pattern of forms begins to emerge. She then makes conscious decisions on which areas to exaggerate further with particular colours, shapes or lines.

Aimee grew up in Michigan in the United States and lived in Italy before settling the UK in 1998. She became a self-taught painter after graduating from the University of Oxford with a Master of Studies and Doctorate in the History of Art. She works in her studio in Formby on the Sefton Coast near Liverpool.