Sandlin lives and works in Boulder, with a studio at the Crowd Collective in the NoBo Art District. She is a painter, sculptor, illustrator, writer and a dabbler in many other creative pursuits. “I don’t think I have one medium," she says, "and I don't want to have one, either.” Sandlin’s use of color, contrast, texture and shapely compositions captivates viewers. Her most recent collection, Story of Your Life, includes seven oil paintings on paper that make up a series of surreal portraiture exploring the themes of memory, nostalgia, time and physics.
Despite her extensive portfolio of visual artwork, her first love was writing. An avid reader as a kid, Sandlin first began expressing herself creatively through poetry and songwriting. This, combined with a deep passion for social justice, is what led her to pursue her undergraduate degree in journalism.
She began her career on the East Coast, writing and editing for several organizations, but it wasn’t long before she realized that journalism wouldn't fulfill her creatively. The remote nature of her work gave her the freedom to move to San Francisco, and she began teaching herself graphic design and implementing those skills within her organization, gradually transitioning her role from editor to in-house designer.
This marked the beginning of Sandlin’s foray into the visual arts pool, and she jumped in fearlessly, quitting her job and starting her own freelance graphic design business. Her adventurous spirit soon took her to New Zealand for a year, where she continued her design work and explored her artistic calling through a project she called the Year of Making, in which she committed to making one creative thing every day for a year.
“It was such a sweet time,” she recalls, “I did a little bit of everything; I tried wood carving and sewing and drawing and painting. It was just a very free time creatively, but it was also very frustrating.” As she had surprisingly never taken any art classes growing up, this was period of true experimentation for Sandlin as she began finding her own voice as an artist.
After returning to the U.S. in 2016, Sandlin converted a van into a home on wheels and traveled the country while continuing her freelance design work and personal art practice. Her explorations eventually brought her to Colorado and, as a climber and outdoor enthusiast, she instantly fell in love with the big mountains and access to nature. The following winter, she decided to move to Denver and dive deeper into her creative practices.
It was that same year that she began creating the series At Wild Woman, a collection of layered photography and intricate line drawings of the female form in nature — altogether untamed, mystical, veracious and wild.
“When I started, I was in my mid-twenties, and I mean, I'm still finding myself now, but in your twenties, you're still really figuring things out. At Wild Woman — it’s just so special to me — it was so reflective of that time in a 25-year-old woman's life, you know? Breakups and moving and really trying to figure things out,” Sandlin reflects. “But I think all of my art has always been just really expressive and personal…and it’s coming from someone who identifies as a woman, and I think that’s in all of the work.” As Sandlin evolved through the years, so did her artwork, and she found herself increasingly drawn to painting as a way to authentically express her internal experiences. “I’ve always felt really drawn to the actual materials of painting, but it has taken me a really long time to feel like I have a grasp on how to actually paint,” she says.
In 2019, she embarked on another solo project similar to the Year of Making; this time, it was 100 Days of Feeling My Feelings. Every day for 100 days, Sandlin sat down to write a poem and create a small painting to capture her emotional state that day. “That was definitely a turning point for me,” she says, “That was when I found oil paint again, and I tried it and it actually worked. I was channeling what I was going through at the time through paint, so something clicked there, and I just didn't turn back from painting from that point.”
Her paintings also began to reflect some of the deeper aspects of her human experience. “I really started to want to embrace my nature as a woman, and a lot of that is so connected to nature and our cycles,” she says. “I think it’s something so special, for people that do menstruate; it's a gift that we have. I have always felt a special connection to nature being a woman, having cycles and being very in tune with that, and I think that has carried through the work. .... I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression for basically my whole adulthood, and only in the last year or two have learned that it’s actually PMDD [premenstrual dysphoric disorder]. Now I’m actually treating it with intermittent use of SSRIs. I’ve always been so resistant to taking medication, but it has changed my life, and I think that it’s going to change a lot of my art practice, too.
“PMDD happens to me at least two weeks out of the month, so that’s half of your life that you are [essentially] depressed," she continues. "So much of my work has come from that darker place…and now I'm finally able to come above the water. I’m really interested to see where my work goes from here.”
"Past Lives," from the Story of Your Life series. Oil paint and charcoal on paper, 16 x 12 inches, 2023.
Amanda Sandlin
As for what’s next, Sandlin feels that she may be at the beginning of a new chapter of her work. “I want to do more sculpture and just really tactile work, maybe some collage, and also going back to illustration,” she says. “I just want to let it totally be free and try new things, and to let go of this idea that it has to be this cohesive body of work and all of that. I’m just excited to really let myself go with making and building things.
“Just being a creative person — that’s really the thing that I want, is just to have a creative life. And that’s very different than having an art practice,” Sandlin concludes. “We live in this world where we feel like everything has to be perfect and always be growing and making us money...but I’m more interested in living creatively. My art practice is included in that, but in order to be able to live creatively, my art practice has to feel a certain way. It is open and generative.”
To learn more about Amanda Sandlin and her work, visit amandasandlin.com and follow her on Instagram here.
