Artist Amy Sol: Experimenting with paint

Leila Navidi

Local artist Amy Sol inside her home studio in Henderson Friday, Aug. 4, 2009.

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Name: Amy Sol, artist

Age: 27

Education: Some college

Her work: Sol’s work is impeccably clean, lyrical and illustrative. She merges manga, Japanese screen prints, children’s illustration and pure fantasy in finely detailed, imaginative landscapes, vignettes and portraits. They are painted in muted colors, and there is always a young woman with dark flowing hair — sometimes set in a meadow, a forest or among animals.

Background: Her mother is Korean and her father was in the Air Force, and the family spent a lot of time in Korea when Sol was young. Inspired by nature and her mother’s Korean celadon vases with miniature scenes painted onto them, Sol spent several hours a day drawing as a child. She spent her summers at her grandfather’s farm in Iowa sketching animals, bugs and scenery. The trips she made with her brother would give her material to work from when back in Vegas.

In her teens she experimented with paints — doing wild acrylic abstract works — before returning to an illustrative style. She spends 150 to 200 hours on each painting and paints and draws about 12 hours a day.

Career in art: Meeting artist Iceberg Slick at a gallery show led her to the Arts District. She showed her work with Slick’s 5ive Finger Miscount and at First Fridays and became a widely collected new artist. In 2006 she had shows at Trifecta Gallery and at CoproGallery in Santa Monica, Calif. Afterward she received an onslaught of offers from galleries throughout the country. Sol overbooked and overwhelmed herself, even having to cancel shows. She’s now limited herself to one solo show a year, is booked for the next three years and attributes part of her success to her work being in the “lowbrow genre.”

Developing her style: After high school Sol took some college courses and eventually quit working odd jobs to become a full-time artist. She and her boyfriend. Dylan Urquidi-Maynard, whose medium is computer, moved in with his parents (his father is artist Lincoln Maynard), where she was given 300 square feet to work on her art. She spent most of that time mixing paint to get the desaturated color palette she is now known for.

She keeps refining her work and says she’s “still not there.”

“I haven’t figured out a way to paint the scene that’s in my mind. It’s like a hologram. It’s more like an essence. I keep working on a piece. I work off intuition, really.”

Vegas art scene: “It changes so fast. There are a lot of new faces. It’s a great place to be an emerging artist because people are very supportive and accepting of new artists finding their way. I feel lucky to have met such incredible people.”

Other interests: Cooking, needle felting, spending time at her brother’s coffee shop, Sunrise Coffee House. Sol and her boyfriend are working on a music video for a Los Angeles-based band.

Sticking around? “I like this city a lot because my parents live here and my brother lives here. And we’re really a close family. I get homesick a lot when I leave.”