Off Grid Studio

Amanda Azous

Off grid refers to my lifestyle but also to my artist mind. 

Nature is my muse. Daily seeing the sky, water and land change from my studio, spending time on the water, exploring the island’s special places, awareness of the changes wrought by human activities …these experiences frame and inspire my work. 

The requirements of compelling composition feel science based. What captures the eye…where light shines…how one travels through a painting and the emotional pathways it takes the viewer. I strive for abstractions capable of carrying the imagination to unknown places…the mind to unthought thoughts. 

Art is as analytical as science but my outcomes as an artist are unhindered by rigid scientific methods and that’s deeply freeing. 

The order of science feeds my soul, yet I thrive in the disorder of artistic expression.

Once an analyst, a scientist and an engineer, I now paint transformational abstract expressions of nature, energy and emotions. My paintings are deep with patterns and textures and often meditational. Off-Grid Studio, where I paint, symbolizes my lifestyle as well as my art forms. 

I see the world as flowing energy. It is a model of the universe I identify with both as a scientist and as a spiritual person.

I paint this energy I see.

Artist’s Bio

I’ve lived on islands the majority of my life. Islanders have a different sensibility about life…maybe it is understanding one’s vulnerability, living where water separates one from ready access to resources, and the importance of connecting to land and the community.

I dabbled in art in high school and early university. I had a piece in a show. I married a talented artist, but we later divorced. Couldn’t make a living at art. My return to art has been circuitous.

I switched course and graduated with a bachelors of landscape architecture (BLA) from University of Washington (UW). It fed my inner artist and was grounded in another less recognized passion, that of science.

But I graduated with my BLA during a time when a billboard was posted in Seattle asking the last person leaving to please turn the lights out. No one needed landscape design. The local economy was in shambles.

I worked on Amtrak as a train attendant for two years while I looked for a professional job.

My first serious professional offer came from The Boeing Company.  I worked at a division called operations analysis where I analyzed and recommended future company investment development opportunities. I was mentored there by a person who liked hiring people with odd backgrounds for the work as he thought they brought out of the box perspectives.  Later I earned a masters in civil engineering and environmental science at UW specializing in water and land resources. 

I had an intense and rewarding science and engineering career. I co-authored and edited a textbook on wetlands and urbanization. I ran my own business and worked for another where I was able to travel to unusual places including Haiti and the Pribiloff Islands. I devoted my career to development that was sustainable and accounted for climate change.

Then I became an Artist again.

Happy for all of it.

When I paint I reach a state of mind where I accept what is. The peace of that is nourishing and the energy released being in that place is ecstatic.