Amanda Bucknill is inspired by images of the personification of luck and chance from antiquity until the present day. Having studied anthropology, Amanda returned to Amersham Art College to study a foundation course and then printmaking and sculpture.

Amanda has loved art since childhood and in recent years she has been able to devote more time to painting. She is motivated more by the heart than the head, finding that it’s interesting to work on different subjects including landscapes, people and pets, always using a medium which suits the subject and her emotional response to it. Amanda works in oils, watercolour, charcoal, graphite and mixed media. Amanda is happy to receive commissions.

Amy Lovell is a self taught portrait and landscape artist. She works in a figurative style, predominatly in oils. Amy’s work has been shortlisted for Artists & Illustrators magazine’s 2023 British Art Prize, and she has been a prize winner at the Cookham Arts Club Summer Exhibition, the Our Changing Earth Art Festival and the Maidenhead Town Show.
Amy enjoys capturing pleasing moments of light, colour or composition, often in scenes that would otherwise be unremarkable. In her portraits of family and local community, she aims to capture moments of pleasure or ‘flow’, when people are fully immersed in and enjoying an activity. She often focusses on the interplay between characters and their setting, and looks for moments of what she describes as ‘chance choreography’, where people are connecting with one another through a shared activity, which leads to symmetry and harmony in their postures and movements.
Amy practices by drawing and painting from life as much as possible, and otherwise works from photo and video references. Amy takes commissions for family portraits.

I’m simply happy when I’m making. I consider myself lucky to have lived my life as a maker. I have been creating things for half a century. In that time I have been a ceramicist, a painter, a gardener … the ‘alchemy of making’ is a lifelong journey. For decades I was a professional sculptural ceramicist. In later years I added painting in oils, layering colour and scratching into the surface as I do in clay. I am led by a relationship between nature and materials. At the heart of my practice is my love of growing things, of growing me.

I have been working in batik for nearly 40 years. Batik is a resist technique of painting. I paint a pattern of hot wax onto my paper or fabric using a special spouted tool, and then paint dye over the surface. The design can be pure pattern, or it can be a complete painting built up from 10 or so layers of wax and dyes.
Much of my inspiration comes from beautifully dilapidated buildings like those I search out on my travels, in India in particular, and structures like seaside piers which I find closer to home. The exciting thing about batik for me is that I never have complete control because more often than not the technique takes over and gives my painting that certain something I can’t achieve with paint. It may be the unpredictable spidery lines of the crackling, or the fact that the wax and dye on paper give you a sort of abstract effect – which is perfect for me because I don’t like perfect! I was for many years one of the tutors at the well-known Art in Action, and I still exhibit widely.