Amelia Stafford Todd

The central struggle of my work is the attempt to find emotional and visual balance between control and letting things happen, between what’s said and what’s left to silence, between reality and its perception, and between accident and intent.

In the past I have used old blueprints of a family house as a starting point on which to build my paintings. To me, the blueprints evoke the wish to plan and control one’s life and to live inside a protected and comfortable grid. In more recent work the blueprint has evolved (or maybe devolved) into a more literal grid.The addition of the tree imagery and the loose handling of the paint in combination represent the unpredictable nature of both the loss and endurance of life and memory, the fluidity of what we mean by “inside” and “outside”, and the ability of art to find beauty in pain.

Amelia Stafford Todd can be contacted at astafford@comcast.net.

More of Amelia Stafford Todd's work


Amelia Stafford Todd, "Church", acrylic, glassine on canvas, 16"x20"