Amy Casey: All The World Is Green
What do you get when you combine an obsessive urge to create, sleep deprivation, climate change anxiety, and penchant for enchanted nature realms? Amy Casey shows us firsthand, through her infinitely detailed paintings of manmade structures, either clashing or peacefully coexisting with natural environments. In these pieces we might find repetitions of fungi, leaves, and moss burgeoning from trees, and hordes of impossibly assembled buildings.
As fantastical as it may seem, Casey’s imagery is based on composites of real-life experience, pulled from mental file cabinets and reinforced by meticulously collected reference material. “I have drawers upon drawers of building photographs from my neighborhood and my travels, organized by the number of stories the buildings have. Though sometimes buildings in my paintings might look non-specific, they are almost all buildings that exist. I also have thousands of pictures of stumps, lake waves, fungi, and other bits of nature—so even the nature parts of my paintings are usually based on things that actually exist,” she says. Abounding from her personal framework are complex worlds harboring universal messages.
Casey’s painted wonders ultimately echo the unresolved questions that continue to haunt humanity. How do we maintain our place on this planet when we want more than it can give us? When an overflowing population clings to its ideals of natural wonder, while at the same time, does everything to snuff it out, how is Mother Earth supposed to react? (She rolls her eyes, muttering “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” under her breath…)
“Nature is precarious and sometimes cruel, and now less predictable than ever. Life as we know it can be taken away so quickly,” she says. In Casey’s world, we can’t be sure whether it’s humans or nature that shall prevail in the end—could it be both? Either way, her paintings show the natural world always thriving, vibrant, while humans, ever dangling by a thread, somehow manage to outwit the odds piled up against them. “I have concerns about how we are running things and am especially worried about climate change. But I am not a scientist; I don’t have answers—I am more intuitive and emotional than intellectual. But I can paint, so I paint. I want to be an optimistic person and believe that we will adapt to the changes all around us, but it’s something I struggle with.”
I HAVE DRAWERS UPON DRAWERS OF BUILDING PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND MY TRAVELS, ORGANIZED BY THE NUMBER OF STORIES THE BUILDINGS HAVE.”
Casey grew up in the small city of Erie, PA, along a creek and pocket of woods ideal for a child to hide in, read in, or hang out with friends and chipmunks. Spending time outdoors played a huge part in her creative development, which began to ripen more fully
in her teens. She confesses, “I was a dorky creative child with a compulsion to make things; and I grew up into a dorky creative adult who paints,” adding: “Painting gave me a fully satisfying outlet for my obsessive energy and, though it took me a while to figure it out, when I did, it gave me a kind of freedom.”
In 1994, Casey ventured to Cleveland (where she currently lives) for her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She absorbed its urban qualities like a sponge, painting numerous arrays of precarious cityscapes over the years. Stacked buildings and houses teetering on stilts, hung from airborne nets, and/or woven together through cryptic networks of rope and wire—often set within the drab background of a pale sky. Yet luscious nature inevitably crept its way back to her mind. After attending some residencies in natural areas, including the Arteles cultural center in Finland (housed next to a magical forest of birch trees and mossy rocks), the city stuff took a backseat for a while. “These experiences rekindled my relationship with nature, and it became much more prominent in my work. Nature began to represent a kind of escape for me, especially from the political noise that gets increasingly louder every year.” Eventually, these two areas of life coalesced into the depictions we’ve come to witness in more recent years.
About five years ago, she started working on six-by-six-inch panels as an antidote to larger, more time-consuming paintings. Within these, lone houses and buildings nestle snugly upon stumps, surrounded by plumes of mushroom and other flora. “I’m in love with the varieties, forms, and textures of stumps. I enjoy their placement between death—the definitive end to one existence— and their alternate status as a platform for new life, whether that’s plants, fungus, creatures, or tiny house refugees doing their best in an unfamiliar strange place, where they are small and a bit overwhelmed by the world,” says Casey. We may wonder if she shrunk herself to achieve such hair-thin detail within such little spaces. But in reality, she uses the teeniest of brushes, hunching over for hours at the cost of an achy back and strained set of eyes.
Her epic, architectural disaster-themed paintings are given considerably more room to convey their monumental effects. “Dissolve Copy” (2024) shows a monstrous pillar erected from the ocean via an infinitude of individual buildings. We witness this leaning “entity” in the moment of collapse: its sides shattering and crumbling into the sea below. Perhaps humanity has been a little too ambitious in its attempt to carve out metropoles, failing to maintain the necessary balance of give and take. In this case, the throat of the ocean begrudgingly swallows the mess the clumsy humans have made.
In addition to remixing the environments around her, reading happens to be an important influence upon her work—a recent example being Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, which influenced the direction of her recent painting “In the Trees.” “I was stuck on the painting—became blocked for almost two years and after reading that book things started moving again. A lot of people have asked me about Calvino’s Invisible Cities, especially in regard to my older work—and yes, I read it and loved it so much that I would have been intimidated to try to purposely recreate it in any way at the time. But just marinating in that world tickles out a way of looking at things, and instilled an awe of creative city and community structures that has definitely informed my work,” says Casey.
… I AM NOT A SCIENTIST; I DON’T HAVE ANSWERS–I AM MORE INTUITIVE AND EMOTIONAL THAN INTELLECTUAL. BUT I CAN PAINT, SO I PAINT.”
THOUGH SOMETIMES BUILDINGS IN MY PAINTINGS MIGHT LOOK NON-SPECIFIC, THEY ARE ALMOST ALL BUILDINGS THAT EXIST.”
Likewise, the stress of watching and reading the news, in turn catastrophizing about life, will also syphon into creative ideas for Casey at times. It’s a positive way of dealing with the negative—the angst that tends to
bottle up within us when we lack control over our shifting environments. “It’s not fun, but it works. I am a night owl that has struggled with sleep issues most of my life, and I think my strange relationship with time and sleep deprivation also feeds into my work—though I wouldn’t recommend it as a source of inspiration if you can avoid it. I spend a lot of time alone or chatting with cats in the middle of the night, and it affects how I see the world,” she says, adding: “Inspiration can come from anywhere if you are paying attention.”
Currently, Casey is wrapping up a mega painting (sixty by forty inches) for a show in November 2025 at Zg Gallery, in Chicago. Titled “Icebergs,” it portrays more piles of houses in water. Yet, rather than following the dilapidated, falling-apart route—she just finished a destruction painting, and two destruction paintings in a row can be depressing—this one will show the structures existing far underwater, a magical realist context in which they somehow manage to stay intact.
Although there is a storytelling aspect to her work she finds very important, Casey isn’t overly attached to any one narrative. “The houses were dropped here in a tornado or a typhoon; a city flooded, and they are sinking; the buildings drifted here in reunion; they were dumped in the water by an uncaring government; or an aquatic people are transitioning to a new normal. Are the buildings coming together? Are they falling apart? I could believe or disbelieve any of these things at any point in the process,” says Casey. “I hope I give enough of an entry point so that people who look at my work can bring their own interpretations to the paintings, and we can experience the weird semi-removed connection that art can create (especially to my people, the introverts!), so we can all be a little less alone.” And somehow, in gazing upon her bird’s eye—anonymous depictions of humanity trying its best to survive—we do feel a little less alone.*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 75 which is available here.
Shudi Liu’s oil and acrylic paintings are both cerebral and playful in nature. The artist disassembles both the body and familiar objects, creating scenes that appear ripped from dreams. And in a single work, this discombobulation seems to come with elation and solitude.
Patt Yingcharoen’s provocative oil paintings build upon constructions from art history, mixing cultures and iconography that continue centuries-long narratives about human nature. In an upcoming show titled "Celebration of flesh and blood" at Number 1 Gallery in the artist's native Bangkok, several new, dark-surrealist works are offered. It arrives in July at the gallery.
Tomokazu Matsuyama’s acrylic and mixed-media paintings move between mythology, abstraction, and contemporary narratives. With differing approaches, his vibrant works are inhabited by a variety of conversations and references to both classical and new approaches. The work also touches on street art, Edo Japanese tradition, and explorations of cultural identity. The artist was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
Anna Weyant’s stirring paintings offer both autobiographical imagery and universal examinations of life’s stages. Recent shows, like "Welcome to the Dollhouse" at 56 HENRY, are contemplative and elegant in execution. That show, in particular, was a showcase of the artist’s cinematic sensibility.