Ember Mountain

This work sits between landscape and internal image. A mountain form emerges through layered colour and underlying structure rather than direct description, suggesting something sensed or remembered rather than observed.

The composition is organised through vertical weight and central mass, stabilising more fluid passages of paint. Areas of luminosity surface and recede within a restrained palette of greens, greys and deep reds, creating a sense of both containment and movement.

There is an affinity with the work of Ferdinand Hodler, particularly in his treatment of mountains as enduring, structural presences shaped through rhythm and repetition. Here, the mountain operates less as a specific place and more as a formal and psychological anchor.

The work reflects an ongoing interest in how experience is registered visually as atmosphere, tension, and structure, rather than fixed narrative.

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Amanda Robins is an Australian painter whose work explores psychological and emotional states through abstract oil paintings and works on paper. Her practice is driven by an ongoing interest in painting as a way of investigating inner experience and the possibilities of materials like oil paint and watercolour.

Working intuitively in the studio, Robins experiments with colour, gesture and form, allowing the process of painting to unfold through exploration and play. The studio remains a space of curiosity and discovery, where ideas emerge through the physical act of making.

Robins studied painting and drawing at Monash University, the Victorian College of the Arts and the College of Fine Art, UNSW. She has taught painting and drawing at several tertiary institutions in Australia and was Head of Painting and Drawing at the South Australian School of Art in Adelaide from 2006 to 2009.

Alongside her studio practice, she works as a psychotherapist in private practice, working with people with a history of attachment trauma
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Website: amandarobinsart.com