Dallas Fort Worth artist, Amy Tigner earned a Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Wyoming, with an emphasis in painting, in the 1980s and had a solo exhibition in Japan in the 1990s.  She had a 20-year hiatus from painting while pursuing an academic career in English Literature.  Since 2006, she has been teaching Shakespeare at the University of Texas, Arlington. After earning tenure in 2013, Amy began painting again, primarily in the medium of watercolor.  She has also worked with alcohol inks and acrylics, and marbling paper and silk scarves, using traditional marbling techniques. Most recently, she has returned to oil painting, which feels a bit like coming home after a long journey.  As an artist, she is always looking for new techniques and new ideas for paintings.

Most recently, she has created a series entitled “Golden Fruits and Flowers.”  All of the work involves the ancient technique of gilding.  Some of the paintings are gilded after they have been painted and some use gilding as the background of the painted image.  Although some works are in watercolor, primarily the botanical paintings, most are in oil.  The series was inspired by a trip to Santa Fe, where she saw a beautiful persimmon painted on goldleaf by artist, Hung Liu. “The simplicity of Liu’s painting against the gilded background appealed to me, and I decided I wanted to try to do a series of fruits and flowers using goldleaf as part of the paintings.”  Nearly all of the works in this style were painted or finished at the end of 2020 and throughout the spring of 2021. The brilliance of the gilding sometimes shining through transparent oil paint and sometimes working as a counterpoint to more opaque paint is a kind of antidote to the difficulties and hardships we all have experienced during the Corona virus pandemic.  The gold signals a hope for the future, and the fruits and flowers represent the ongoing bounty of life.   

Currently, Amy lives in Grapevine, Texas with her husband, Tom, and her ridgeback/boxer, Harper.

Feel free to email her, amytigner@yahoo.com, if you are interested in a commission.  You can also follow her Facebook or Instagram, Amy Tigner Art.