When artist Amanda Jones travelled to Greece for a self-guided artist residency, she didn’t know what would happen. Art materials were pickup up in Athens, lugged across the sea to a tiny village on a Greek island that tourists don’t frequent. What she set out to do was create art – what she ended up doing was so much more. We caught up for a chinwag with Amanda to find out about her time in Greece and how her new body of work, Colour of Water, came to be.Tell us about you and your art practice. I became an artist by accident. Truly, no one was more surprised than me. I was a filmmaker before this and in a lot of ways I still feel like a filmmaker who is just painting at the moment – even though art has been my full focus for about four years now and it only seems to be growing. I just keep following my curiosities.What led you to exploring your creative practice in Greece? A soft belief in my wildest dream whispered me to the Mediterranean. A gentle laying hold of a bigger-than-me notion. That dream showed me the curation of time it needed. I explored a few structured artist residencies in Greece, ultimately either their requirements, location or timeline didn’t line up with mine. So I bought the plane tickets and I booked my own accommodation. I looked for places that were remote, which meant sometimes taking multiple days to arrive, but it was so worth it for the feeling of absolute solitude in these incredible locations.

I remember meeting locals in Athens and telling them we were going to Thirasia. They looked so confused and asked, “Why?” After this happened a few times, I got a bit concerned that I had made a huge mistake. But something in me knew it was going to be spectacular. And it was.

When we finally made it to our first remote destination, we discovered thousands of abandoned cave homes preserved in white ash rock. It was like discovering a hidden treasure, being able to paint inside these cave homes that only a handful of locals know about.How did being somewhere so far from home change how you approached making art? It gave me the freedom to deeply sink into the process – allowing the landscape to leave its mark on me as well as the canvas.

There was a lot of negotiation with the environment. Not just the sea, but the wind, rain and sun all factoring into when and how to paint. The idea was to do a total treatment of the canvas in the sea before bringing it onto shore to apply colour. The Mediterranean was actually ideal for this process. When the sea was calm, I could let the canvas just float out knowing it wasn’t going to be pulled out into a current, like it certainly would here in Australia. As the pigment and acrylic met the deeply soaked canvas, they moved in really beautiful shapes, especially with the rocks beneath creating little valleys for the colour to run through. It was impossible to really have control of what I was painting, which was exactly what I wanted.

Being on an empty island is a kind of solitude that unearths those deeper reflections simmering behind daily to-dos. The prose in this collection holds a gentle curiosity for things seeming one way, but upon closer look tell another story. I use the natural world as a mirror to the inner perceptions we tell ourselves, what colour actually is water?What did the day-to-day of the artist residency look like for you? My partner Kristian was with me and we shaped our days together. I would paint and he would capture it on film or cook us meals. We made friends with the few locals on the island and shared meals with them, followed by more dancing than even I could handle. We stayed in converted boathouses or cave homes, which we sometimes had to hire an off-road car to get to. For art supplies, I brought all my canvas with me, rolled in our suitcases. In Athens I scoured art stores to gather paint, brushes, soft pastels and other things. When I travel for art making, I like to be open about materials and be led by what’s available locally. There were some incredible soft pastels I found that really shaped the collection. We were quite the sight lugging all of this into small boats to cross the islands. I was vigilant about leaving nothing in the environment – not a drop of any medium. Absolutely everything went into the canvas. Plenty of environment went into the artworks, though.Describe your collection, Colour of Water, in a sentence. Permission to see the story a different way.

How do the three chapters of the project Kisses From Heaven, Spring Wildflower and Sea Sparkles inform and interact with each other? I curated a slow release for this collection, not because of its size – although I think it is my largest yet – but because of the size of the story it has to tell. Each artwork has a long story of how or where it was made and I have really enjoyed the space to share little details.

Kisses From Heaven was named because as I was painting one day it started to rain, but it was such a gentle rain that I left the canvas to be kissed by the water from the sky. Spring Wildflowers is a nod to how the island greeted us, like someone had come and made thousands of bouquets across the entire island just for us. And Sea Sparkles brings us back to the water. I love the poetry of the stars being found on the surface of the sea. Perhaps not where they are supposed to be, but where they are creating beauty.What’s next for you in your creative practice? Finding lovely homes for this collection. After a life changing creation process, I’m really enjoying watching people discover them as if they were reading my diary and choosing them to become part of their own landscape. There’s a lot of care in bringing art to the right collector, so it’s beautiful work to set my hands to.

After that, I do have another completely audacious idea that I am very curious to see where it leads.

Spy Amanda Jones’ work this-a-way. For more rad arty chats, have a squiz at our chinwag with a lovely ceramicist or check out our chat with a ripper snail mail artist. Plus, sign up to our newsletter for more goodness.