The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
Amy Deal
ArtistDayton OH 45402 United States Cell Phone: 9373695218 Website: https://www.amydeal.com/
Bio
Amy Deal (b. 1966 Cranberry Prairie, OH) is a mixed media painter and visual designer. Her art has evolved over the last few years. She is known for her mural designs in Dayton, OH. Her largest mural is over 900 linear sq ft along the Great Miami River at Downtown Dayton’s Five River MetroParks RiverScape River Run. Amy has also worked with nonconventional materials to create commentaries on how consumerism is denigrating our environment. Her current series of works is intuitive, abstract expressionist paintings made with acrylic, oil, oil stick, and cold wax. This series focuses on her need to return to her childhood roots in rural Ohio and reflects the concept that ‘Art Heals.’
Amy received the Top 25 Artist Award in 2017 at our nation’s largest independently organized international art competition, ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She also received the Devos Place Convention Center Purchase Prize. Her mixed media large-scale artwork titled Blooming Flowers is in DeVos Place’s Permanent Collection of Art. Other Awards include the Material Exploration Award from Surface Design Journal’s Sixth Annual International Exhibition in Print: From Confrontation to Catharsis. She has also received Best In Show and the Juror Purchase Prize with Dayton Visual Art’s Center. Amy’s art and her process has been documented and featured on The Art Show, ThinkTV and was nominated for an Ohio Valley Regional Emmy Award in the category of Arts/Entertainment.
Amy’s artworks are in the collections of Dayton Children’s Hospital, Miami Valley Hospital | Premier Health, CARE House Children’s Advocacy Center, University of Dayton, CO Hatch Coworking Offices, Dayton’s Think TV corporate offices, PNC Arts Annex | Dayton Live, Dayton Visual Arts Center, Springfield Museum of Art, and University of Indiana.
Artist Statement
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton
Painting is my vehicle to make sense of life. With today’s national and international concerns of racial and gender discrimination, environment failings, and ethnic and religious wars facing us today, I find it difficult to focus. Painting has become my solution. Painting today is about the process. With an earlier career in design and visual communications I found the need for purpose and reason with my creative results. Today I find the physical process of painting to render comfort.
The last four years have been stocked with narratives of personal loss. These losses are regular life moments that everyone will face at some point of their being. In addition to this, I suffer bipolar depression. I have discovered that art does heal. Painting lends an additional key for peace and reconciliation. The solution of painting is my medicine. The act of mixing color, making gestural marks with different painting tools, while facing a blank canvas with an internal force of emotion that needs to be visualized is my answer. Repetitive shape making, long brush strokes, short brush strokes, visual patterns and textures provide a revisiting of stories that were essential to my growth. The line between realism and abstract becomes blurry. I’m painting what I hear inside my soul more than what I see in front of my resolve.
My current need is to lose myself while finding myself. Painting transports me into a different dimension of awareness. It enables me to stay near the people who are no longer here. They are in my art. Art heals.