Snapshots of Popular Media: Art by Amber Petersen
Free Line Face No 5, acrylic, conte and gel medium on stretched canvas
Featured artist Amber Petersen is a painter and illustrator who frequently combines pop-culture references and bright, stylized imagery. The small scale of many of her works makes them all the more appealing, as bite-sized snapshots of popular media and referential humour.
Untitled, acrylic and gel mediums on wood panel
Amber’s most recent artworks use a bright, almost neon colour palette, combining abstracted line art and figural forms with patches of pure colour. I like the layered look that Amber achieves in these works, building up a multitude of tiny, different-coloured marks that somehow all complement one another to create a frantic, energetic whole.
In our last feature, we looked at her pop-cultural portraits. The artist has created a series of tiny canvas portraits of figures from well-known movies and television shows. In her online store, Amber sells sets of buttons featuring paintings of such figures. Each set comes with four or six buttons depicting characters or popular catch-phrases from series like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Portlandia.
The Walking Dead, 1" buttons printed with artworks made from acrylic and ink on canvas