Amanda Furlong was a Western Australian artist, art teacher and fashion designer whose creative life spanned more than three decades.
Amanda Furlong was a Western Australian artist, art teacher and fashion designer whose creative life spanned more than three decades.
After completing a Diploma of Art Teaching in 1979, Amanda spent two years teaching in Milan, Italy. She returned to Perth to continue her studies, graduating from the former Nedlands College of Advanced Education with a Bachelor of Education in Visual Arts, specialising in Painting and Printmaking.
Amanda later taught art at Maseru Preparatory School in Lesotho, where she lived for two years, before returning to Australia.
Her creativity also found expression through fashion. For five years, Amanda designed her own label, Furlanda, from a store in George Street, East Fremantle. Drawing on her background in art and painting, she created women’s clothing characterised by rich colours, tactile fabrics and simple, classic lines. Her designs were intended to be comfortable and wearable beyond a single season, with a focus on creating clothing for a broader range of women rather than a narrow ideal. Her collections were manufactured locally in Western Australia.
Art remained a constant throughout Amanda’s life. She was a prolific artist and exhibited regularly in Western Australia, including at Rokeby Originals Gallery, the annual Bankwest Art Exhibitions, the MLC Art Exhibition, Hamelin Bay Winery and the University of Western Australia. In 2012, she held a two-week solo exhibition at the Moores Building in Fremantle.
Across painting, printmaking, teaching and fashion, Amanda’s work was grounded in a strong sense of colour, form and the human figure. Her body of work captures a creative practice that evolved over decades while retaining a distinctly personal style.
Amanda passed away from lung cancer in 2014, aged 55. She left behind a collection of paintings and drawings that her family continues to preserve and share.
ABOUT AMANDA’S WORK
Amanda’s work challenged traditional representations of the naked female form. Her signature style captured the essence and uniqueness of each individual, celebrating women in their many shapes and forms rather than presenting a single ideal.
Whether gracefully tapering, curving or lyrical, her lines were clean, strong and true. Years of life drawing and close observation of the human form refined Amanda’s ability to capture a figure in one flowing line.
Amanda often exaggerated contours, amplifying curves and elongating proportions to enhance the negative spaces around the figure. Sinewy, delicate and sharply defined outlines translated the soft, rounded areas of the body. There was no fuss or ambiguity.
In her paintings, bold, pure colour heightened the effect of these simplified forms. Her figures could be voluptuous and rounded or long and angular. Rather than smoothing away these differences, Amanda accentuated them, giving each woman her own character.
Her charcoal drawings were more gestural. Changes in pressure and line weight could suggest the sweep of a hip, the curve of a back or the turn of a shoulder in only a few marks. The areas she left untouched were as considered as the marks themselves.
Contemporary and minimalist in style, Amanda’s large, bright paintings and stylised charcoal drawings were striking in their simplicity. Her distinctive use of contour, colour and negative space made the work unmistakably her own and offered an escape from the fuss of everyday life.
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Ennuie
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Meow
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Disheartened
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Jade
