Statement and Bio
Artist Statement
Amanda Greavette is an oil painter who creates life-size figurative pieces and landscapes. Amanda loves the human form and is drawn to the stories of life, especially those that involve transformation, relationships, struggle and love. One of the guiding philosophies of her art practice is to ‘paint what you know’, making art that reflects one’s own experience, passion and interest. While her figurative work is representational, it is also expressive and symbolic and refers to the inner landscape. Painting the sacred and transcendent in common moments, in a vibrant and emotive fashion makes the work memorable and impactful.
2025 Statement – I am a figurative oil painter and I make paintings about the shifting interior landscapes of women.
I paint to understand my own experience of living in a woman’s body—one that has birthed, breastfed, bled, and been shaped by pleasure, pain, loss, longing, love and change. I paint to map what feels ephemeral, difficult to express, and hard to name.
My work explores identity in constant flux and the quiet, often invisible revolutions within a woman’s life: the births and deaths of selves, the tension between agency and obligation, freedom and caregiving, invisibility and emergence. These thresholds spur us to shed, adapt and reassemble, and while we’re not always aware, they leave their imprint in the body like sediment stirred by tide, slowly settling over time.
The figure is always central to my work. I combine precise forms with expressive mark-making to mirror the tension between clarity and uncertainty that defines this season of life. Atmospheric colour, gesture, and negative space are tools for accessing memory, intuition, and emotional undercurrents and to evoke the complexity of this liminal space. Forms blur or dissolve, as if submerged in memory or fog. Water, sky and foliage are recurring motifs—natural elements that mirror the fluidity and resilience of women’s inner worlds. In my paintings and created world, nature is also a figure as muse, healer, inner wise woman and guide. While I love the body, portraiture is also a significant subject, as my figures are not anonymous objects, but individuals- the personal is the universal. I’m interested in what it means to be seen, to inhabit a body as both shelter and landscape, to carry both strength and uncertainty, of power and vulnerability. I enjoy having some slightly awkward elements; a direct gaze, shifted perspective, a surprising element to tip the viewer slightly off-balance, hint at the discomfort in stages of transition, and allow beauty to soothe and allow space for whatever might feel uncomfortable.
Ultimately, my work is a practice of listening—of paying attention to what’s moving just beneath the surface, my surface, which I assume is mirrored in other’s—and of making space for the full, contradictory truth of becoming. My hope is that the pieces have a fluidity, spaciousness, and emotional depth that’s anchored in natural and internal landscapes. I wish to give my figures a lightness, sublimity and grace that conveys a sense of memory, embodiment, and reverie at play despite the turmoil that reshapes them.
Bio
Amanda Greavette (b. 1981) is a Canadian figurative oil painter. She lives and works in Muskoka, Ontario and has maintained a studio practice since she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design with a BFA in 2004. Amanda has developed multiple bodies of work, notably ‘the Birth Project, a 10 year series depicting birth and early motherhood, which has shown internationally. Amanda’s work explores the emotional terrain of womanhood, particularly the raw, layered experiences of childbearing and midlife. Alongside her studio practice, she volunteers in various local organizations supporting women. Amanda offers private commissions and her paintings have been collected across North America, Australia and Europe. She is raising a large family and together they have built two houses, one being an off-grid homestead, the other a lakeside retreat. Amanda loves to be connected to the land and her favourite place to be is outside, by the water.
Press
Birthing Magazine – Publication
Visualizing Birth – Discussion Article II