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Home: Austin, Texas, USA
Education: BA in English literature, Rice University
Medium: Watercolor
Site: www.amyfarrier.com
Inspirations: Japanese woodblock prints, children's books, lush gardens, birds, documentaries, good design.
Amy's illustrations and watercolors have always captured my eye. Her style is inquisitive and flowing. Her art has a literary sense about it and her images, while clean and uncomplicated, welcome me into her imagination and tell me her story. "Rumi's Field" is inspired by the following poem:
Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language
—even the phrase “each other”—
do not make any sense.
Rumi
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Biography
Amy Farrier is an illustrator and designer currently living in Austin, Texas. After graduating with a degree in English literature from Rice University, she went on to teach English to adults in Houston, edit documents for a small consulting firm in New York, and manage communications for a nonprofit organization in Austin, before realizing that what she really wanted to do involved drawing, painting, and solving problems visually.
Since this rediscovery of art, Amy has worked mainly in watercolor, often with pen and ink elements. Much of her art is focused towards the children’s book world — figurative and filled with animals and children — but she also enjoys exploring the properties of watercolor pigments in abstract works.
Some of her influences include: Japanese woodcuts, Hitchcock movies, the color red, white space, Townes Van Zandt songs, happy accidents in watercolor, David Attenborough nature programs, organic gardening, big skies, spare prose, and simple lines.
Statement
Many of my images start with a word or a concept, which goes through several interpretations in my mind and a couple more in my sketchbook before ending up on the final paper. The mental mulling over before pulling out even a pencil can be the most time-intensive part of the process. Of course, some of the images arrive fully formed in my head and demand little from me but putting my pen and brush to paper; these are gifts. Whichever way I get there, the most joy in creating a piece comes in seeing the way the ink comes off the nib onto the page, manipulating with brush and hand the way the watercolor blends or glazes, pools or gets absorbed into thirsty paper, and watching the way the picture in my imagination takes on its own life on the page.
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Artist's Website:
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