Artist
Molly van Amerongen
Molly van Amerongen is a London-based abstract artist using using oil, acrylic, pigment and collage. She loves the richness of pigments, which create “colours without names”. Collage is also very important in her process, and she takes elements from drawings, incorporating them into larger scale paintings. Her compositions aren't always conscious and she likes that there's an element of chance and 'the accidental' in her work. Each viewer can have their own interpretation and experience - pushing them to unexpected places.
Having spent long stints working and living in both India and Mexico, her interests lie predominantly with colour and the stories it can tell. "Colour can bring you back to a particular place, and it can create new continents, full of detail, allowing memory and imagination to interact." She is interested equally in the domestic and the exotic: in objects and in the spaces between them. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2015 and now works between her studio as a painter and as a freelance specialist-painter and set designer.
Read In The Studio With Molly van Amerongen
Molly's Style
The impulse behind Molly's abstractions is very personal - it comes from a mixture of memory and imagination. “I use photography and drawing in my work which sparks a recollection of things seen, which in turn allows the imagination to create a space which has not yet been seen. It is important to me to spend time in other cultures (India, Morocco, Mexico), places where colour is central to the meaning of life, and a form of storytelling.
I think it’s a good idea to replenish my palette every so often, to cleanse the doors of perception, which London (like any sophisticated European city) tends to close rather than open. I also draw influence from the artists I love, a few of my favourites are Helen Frankenthaler, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Robert Motherwell, Howard Hodgkin – and Mark Rothko."
Her debut collection is based around the idea that her paintings are like windows into other worlds. “I started to think of my paintings as windows during lockdown –windows onto memories of other places – and since then I have been working with variations on this theme or idea.”
"Rothko said of his abstractions: ‘I have made a place.’ I would like one day to be able to say the same. As for windows, they are border crossings, which communicate between two places, inside and outside, present and past, fact and wish. I think of how much time was spent looking out of windows during lockdown." - Molly van Amerongen
Shop by Collection
March Drop 2023
"Taking elements from smaller collages and works on paper - this series of paintings feel urgent and visceral, inspired by the Irish landscape, the winds, the ever changing weather, the opening of skies and the sudden warmth of spring” - Molly Van Amerongen, Winter Collection
Drop 3 - High Summer 2022
"A new collection of paintings on wood - Memories from East Africa to Rural Normandy." - Molly van Amerongen, Loose Chippings
Drop 1 - New Year 2022
"A series of miniatures which act like snapshots, or Polaroids. I like to work on a large amount at once and to see them together brings me great joy." - Molly van Amerongen, Miniatures
Open Windows
"I started to think of my paintings as windows during lockdown – windows onto memories of other places – and since then I have been working with variations on this theme or idea." - Molly Van Amerongen
