Aab802 through the surf
Exhibitions

Anthony Amos - Far Horizons

A won­der­ful col­lec­tion of paint­ings by Antho­ny Amos, a huge­ly tal­ent­ed marine artist who cap­tured the hard­ship and chal­lenges of life at sea.

Influenced by Rembrandt and Turner, Anthony Amos's paintings have a unique raw power that is impossible to ignore. It takes someone very special to take an old rusting hull and turn it into a thing of beauty. And yet that is exactly what the late marine artist Anthony Amos (1950-2010) did in his stunning paintings.

Drawing on his vast experience of life at sea, Amos created beautiful paintings that bring to life scenes from a bygone era. Anthony Amos was born in Bristol in 1950. At the age of 16 he joined the Merchant Navy and spent the next twenty five years at sea working on trawlers, tugs and deep-sea cargo ships. He returned for a short while to his home town to help in the restoration of Brunel's SS Great Britain. Throughout his travels he filled hundreds of sketchbooks with skillful drawings and detailed notes on the places and people he observed. He was an avid reader with a huge thirst for knowledge. If he was in port long enough he would go off to the local library and pour over old history books and books of art devouring every detail.

In the early 1990s he moved to Devon and began to paint full-time exhibiting widely, mainly in the South West but also in Dublin, Bristol and London at the Mall Galleries, where he was a prize-winner at the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

Amos developed his own unique style of painting. He used water-mixable oils, often mixed with bitumen, and preferred to paint with his fingers and bits of rag, scoring the surface and often leaving thumb prints on the hard white board. He loved the physicality of painting, it was his passion, and he captured beautifully those moments in time, of almost forgotten memories, celebrating human endeavour and endurance.

In his hands old working tugs become majestic titans of the sea, tractors on the beach look stylish and elegant under huge skies that seem to go on forever, and the faces of hard-working men and women convey strength, character and endurance.

Anthony Amos’s paintings are raw and powerful, beautifully crafted observations of human nature and are as fresh and relevant today as when they were created.
Aab802 through the surf
CREDIT
Disciplines
Painting