Amanda Drage is an artist currently living and working in the Rothwell/Kettering area. She runs a well-established business painting pet portraits for clients, and spends the rest of her time developing her own practice. She enjoys painting and drawing animals, birds and wildlife, and works with a range of media including oils, soft pastel, and charcoal.
Amanda's animal paintings are mostly representational and realistically painted, although she does like to work in a looser more expressive style from time to time. She enjoys close-ups and unusual compositions, and her focus is often on the gaze of the animal and what it reveals. She is moved by contrasts in light and shadow, and vibrant color. In more recent work Amanda has been experimenting with patterning and mark-making, adding a more contemporary dimension to her animal paintings.
In 2016 Amanda's piece Serenity, a close-up portrait of a horse in soft pastel, picked up the overall prize in Northamptonshire's Open 16 show, and shortly afterwards was chosen as the winner of the People's Choice in the same exhibition. This led to her first solo exhibition, Animals Colour & Light, which was held at the Alfred East Art Gallery in Kettering the following year. Since then Amanda has undertaken an Arts Council funded commission to produce a collection of paintings of local birds for a community arts project run by Deep Roots Tall Trees in Corby. A second solo exhibition, Catching The Light, was held at Corby's Rooftop Arts Centre in 2019.
