Ed Winkleman talks to painter Amanda Church about her work.

Asked about the particular combination of abstraction and representaion in her work, Church notes: "when I was spending a lot of time in LA I would sketch from things around me: buildings, swimming pools, trees and flowers, and sometimes people. These drawings eventually became paintings with a different life and language of their own, filtered, as you suggest, through my own vision…  I have been including abstracted body parts in my work for a long time… Most of the time they are self-portraits, but occasionally I work from appropriated photographs and so those figures are more removed—they don't have counterparts in real life."