Amanda Phillips: Architectural Landscape Painter

Amanda Phillips is a Scottish artist whose landscape paintings uniquely synthesize her dual expertise in fine art and architecture. Her distinctive practice explores the sensory and atmospheric dimensions of place, creating works that engage both visual and auditory memory.

Educational and Professional Background

Amanda's creative journey began with training as a painter before she pursued architecture, earning a First Class Honours degree and establishing herself as a chartered architect. For many years, she worked on high-profile building projects, developing a sophisticated understanding of spatial relationships, structure, and design. This architectural career was complemented by over a decade of teaching at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Napier University, where she made history as the first tutor to teach in both the School of Design and the School of Fine Art at ECA.

Amanda Phillips' Artistic Philosophy

At the heart of Amanda's current practice is an interest in creating experiences rather than traditional 'pictures.' Her recent work focuses on capturing the atmospheres and acoustics of landscapes—the soundtracks of places that contribute to our memories of experiencing them. She describes her approach as aiming to capture not just what we see, but what we hear and feel in a landscape, translating these sensory impressions into visual language.

Technique and Materials

Amanda works spontaneously, adopting a mixed media approach that creates richly layered surfaces. Her toolkit includes paint, gesso, charcoal, pastel, printed paper, and pencil, which she uses to build depth and complexity. A distinctive feature of her work is the incorporation of tartan paper or graph paper, where grid patterns enhance visual complexity while referencing her architectural background and what she describes as her love of lines. The tartan paper provides flashes of color combinations familiar to Scottish viewers, adding cultural resonance to her compositions.

Visual Language

Industry and engineering also fascinate Amanda, and she frequently incorporates diagrammatical lines and mathematical engineering symbols into her paintings. Her mark-making may initially appear random and abstract, but these marks address the acoustics of landscape—visual translations of sound and atmosphere. She deliberately creates paintings with layers that reveal something different with each viewing, inviting ongoing engagement and personal interpretation.

Professional Recognition

Amanda has received awards in both architecture and painting, acknowledging her exceptional contributions to both fields. Approximately half of her current workload consists of commissions built up over years of practice, including work for prestigious clients such as the Royal Scottish Academy and the NHS. Her ability to bring architectural understanding to landscape painting has resulted in works that balance structural intelligence with spontaneous, experimental expression.

Thematic Exploration

Amanda's paintings reflect her response to landscapes in what she describes as a visually poetic way. They are about feelings as well as observations, acknowledging that our relationships with places change as we move through life. This philosophical approach—combined with her technical versatility and unique background—has established her as a distinctive voice in contemporary Scottish landscape painting, creating works that engage viewers intellectually, emotionally, and sensorially.