Amanda Gruenwald's large abstractions are fluid, organic explorations of the dynamics of the painting process. The artist's work is a combination of chance, sudden inspiration, and deep contemplation. Her works are dynamic, open-ended expressions of energy through paint, gestural abstractions at the boundary of colour field and gestural abstraction.

Gruenwald's latest exhibition marks a change of direction, though one which expands her previous canon in a surprising yet entirely logical way. If the artist's work is open-ended, it suggests something beyond its borders. In its most prosaic sense, for an artist, this suggests the drop cloths, the easels, and in Gruenwald's case the floor upon which her paintings are created. The random paint marks upon these surfaces have become a reference for the artist's new works, a corpus which "elevates the incidental, through a process of intuitive reflection and deliberation."¹

Exploring the random patterns created as a side-effect of previous painting, the artist has found an inspiration which acknowledges her past work while extending her practice in a new direction. The accumulation of residual marks have to an extent become an effective postmodern expression of the activity of painting, a breaking of the fourth wall that separates the finished image from the process of creation. The artist understands the presence of painterly language and visual grammar in the random marks, discovering her own painted vernacular and developing her own visual grammar through "looking and doing".²