Portfolio: Dave Amos profile

Snowboard Canada Magazine

Winter 2009

“Artist File: Dave Amos”*

The art department at SBC Media can be a pretty hectic place: a crazy mix of creative people, stressed-out editors, super-tight deadlines and hundreds of pages of editorial copy that need to be designed.
It’s in this chaotic mix where you’ll find Toronto artist David Amos every day. A graphic designer by day and painter by night, Amos is one of the designers of this magazine, along with other titles in the SBC magazine family. Yes, we’re featuring one of our own here, but with half a dozen art shows to his credit, appearances in two books and two magazines, Amos is a qualified artist in his own right and has been a part of skateboarding and snowboarding culture in Canada for nearly his whole life.
Originally from Barrie, Ontario, Amos spent much of the 90s as a well-known halfpipe competitor, riding for Sims and competing all over the country. He kept it up until he turned 22, when he decided that going to school was probably a wiser career choice than doing a few more years on the pro competitive circuit.
The gap left by snowboarding was quickly filled by art. He (surprisingly) did not start painting until the age of 20, when he discovered that he not only enjoyed it, but also had no trouble filling a canvas once he started. His earliest work focused on cityscapes—dark, almost abstract depictions of urban architecture, streets and life.
He spent so much time skateboarding, he says, it was a natural instinct to paint the things he saw on a daily basis in the city.
“I always wanted the paintings to reflect the mood of where I was. From skateboarding in cities, there’s a certain aesthetic – the dirtiness of a curb, or cracks in the concrete – a kind of raw aesthetic that always stuck with me. So I always wanted to include that in my cityscapes because that’s what I grew up around.”
Today, Amos’ work is primarily focused on what he describes as “environmental landscapes.” They are haunting, beautiful, ink-on-canvas works, often stained by water, some water-based paint and other naturally based materials. He wants the mediums he uses to create the art to mirror its content—if it is to depict nature, it must look natural itself.
The move to this style was an evolution of the questions, the contradictions, he increasingly saw in the urban environment around him. The raw aesthetic of his more recent work, he says, marks the intersection where the cityscapes he once portrayed meet the natural environment they sit upon. What would happen, he wondered, if we all just one day went away?
“My paintings try to depict the conflict between the manmade environment and the natural environment and how over time, the natural environment is going to try and reclaim everything that we build if we leave it alone. There’s a beauty in that transition that I always wanted to depict in my paintings.”
Amos likes to work on the landscapes outdoors whenever possible—on the back deck of his old apartment or, more recently, at the house in eastern Toronto he just purchased with girlfriend Stephanie Dewar. He also paints very quickly—once he sits down to start working on a concept, he’ll see it through to its finish before the inspiration is lost.
The speed at which he completes his paintings is a bonus to him in the workplace too, where he concepts and executes intricate magazine layouts in often very short amounts of time. Painting at home, there are no deadlines and no consequences if an idea is abandoned—as they often are—or not finished to the quality that he originally wished. But in the world of graphic design, there are most certainly consequences to a design not finished on time, or to the quality that was desired. The lessons of his day-to-day work, though, are carried through to the painting he does at night.
“My graphic design has always influenced my painting and my painting has always influenced my graphic design. With graphic design, there are rules that you need to follow because you are always designing for someone else. So there are things that you have to do. But the restraint of having to do that helps with painting because in art, you can kinda go crazy and do whatever you want, but I think that it’s good have a level of restraint—that helps make you a better painter.”
“And it’s the same with graphic design,” he continues. “A lot of people can get stuck doing design on a computer all the time and having a painting background helps you see that you can get off the computer and that there are different ways to do design. The computer is really just a tool.”
In the past few years, Amos has gone from a paint-in-your-house-for-fun kind of artist to a genuinely recognized one. His art has been featured in several solo shows and four publications and more opportunities seem to come along all the time. And although it was essentially questioning whether or not he’d like to stay at his posh job designing for SBC, we asked him anyway: Would you ever move to being a full time artist if you had the chance?
“Well, I already consider myself to do art full time anyway, I don’t consider it a pastime. But I don’t know. If I could afford to … actually, I don’t know if I would. I don’t know if I would ever stop designing. If I had an ideal thing, maybe they could amalgamate fine art and graphic design. But I don’t know if that’s what I want. That’s the only way I could quit one or the other—if they were intertwined.”

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*This is an unedited version of the article, appearing here as submitted.