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Each artwork in our latest look book seems to pulsate with vitality, each piece a celebration of life's ephemeral beauty. Amidst the turbulence of today's world, this collection reminds us to find joy in living, particularly as Spring unfurls around us. Through a kaleidoscope of colors and textures, the artworks convey resilience and optimism, urging us to embrace the fleeting moments of delight and immerse ourselves fully in the world that surrounds us.

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Our last look book of the year has us focused on interconnectivity. The world has felt so fractured as of late, leaving us searching for those elements that can make us feel connected. The artworks here reflect our relations to humanity, and the natural world surrounding us, counteracting some of the emotions we have felt this past year. We hope you feel the same as you flip through our latest selections.

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As the summer draws to a close, our collective sentiments begin to shift. Vibrant, hot days give way to crisp, cool nights. Light shifts, colors fade, and the excitement for a new season sets in. There is a bit of a paradox, however; while we happily anticipate all that the new season brings, we still try to hold onto that sense of life we feel in the warmer months. We invite you to view some selected artworks that have evoked these feelings within us - that bittersweet space where something ends and something new begins. 

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Color!

Movement!

Flowers!

Sun!

Our latest look book centers on everything Spring. We can’t help but feel a sense of levity and cheer when viewing these artworks. Nature is the ultimate source of artistic inspiration, and the artists featured here have interpreted it in such unique and varied ways. From works on paper, to sculpture, to murals, these works remind us of the endless possibilities in art. We hope you pull from these pages a renewed sense of optimism, spring-boarding you into a new and colorful season.

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The new year is always such a transitional time, invoking thoughts of beginnings, change, updates, newness. Certain pieces that have caught our eye lately are no different, providing us with a fresh perspective on what art can be, redefining boundaries and showcasing new possibilities.

Whether sculpture, painting, photograph, or ceramic, each of the pieces here stretches our eye outside of the status quo. Embroidery isn’t always for grandmothers and handkerchiefs; pottery is not always a perfectly round vase thrown on a wheel. Symmetry, color, and composition are often thrown off kilter, subsequently provoking us to question just what we really need to find balance and harmony.

In 2023 we are welcoming this disruption, using it as a catalyst to explore more and experience concepts previously unknown to us. We hope you are granted with the same feeling as you peruse our latest inspiration board, and are left with a renewed feeling of possibility and novelty for the upcoming year.

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Summer is officially here, and we are all in. We wanted to showcase some pieces that represent the sights, sounds, and emotions we are experiencing this season. Vibrant colors, radiant patterns, and bold dimension abound in these pieces, evocative of the joy we feel being outdoors with family and friends.

We hope you enjoy this bite-sized selection of sunny inspiration. Happy Summer!

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We dipped a toe into texture, color, fiber, and structure with our last inspiration board, and this time we are diving in head-first. Spring is officially here, and as the landscape explodes around us, it only fuels a desire in us to see more of the same through art.

These pieces are literally vibrating with bright colors, bold shapes, and textures that are anything but smooth. Our energy has been bottled up during these long years of isolation, and we are ready to experience life (and art) with gusto.

We are excited to share these pieces with you, and hope you discover new artists you may not have known before.

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There is something about being cooped up the past winter (some might even say the past two years) that makes us want to get out and feel a physical sense of connection to the world around us.

It’s a new year, and a new season is starting to awaken. We wanted to explore the tactile nature of Spring in our latest inspiration board; artworks that use texture, color, fiber, and structure to deliver to the viewer a tangible sensation.

We hope you enjoy our first Inspiration Board of 2022. We are excited to see what else the year has out there for us.

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After a busy year with lots of dimensional, off-the-wall art selections, this collection is a return to more classical eye-candy. Continuing to find great color but reveling in these calm, classic modern pieces.

Please enjoy our last Inspiration Board of 2021.

I know we are all looking forward to what the new year will show us!

Words with Friends | Erika Lee Sears

Erika Lee Sears: An artist from whom we can always expect the unexpected

Mallory Johnson (APP) for Amy Parry Projects

Erika Lee Sears is an artist out of Portland, OR whose work you may have seen on Portlandia or covering Lana Del Rey’s book, Violent Bent Backwards Over the Grass. Her work is made magical by her bold, expressive color palette, the way she captures the shimmer and shine of objects such as disco balls or the flame of a candle atop a birthday cake, and the nuance and contemporary feel she brings to her paintings.

Like many of us, she enjoys true crime podcasts and spending time with her family, and like very few of us, she makes art every single day. Her artwork encourages us to romanticize our own lives and to look differently at the objects all around us.

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APP: Have you ever had a moment where you wanted to stop making art every day and if so, what motivated you to continue?

ELS: The reason I create an original piece of art every day is that after the birth of my son I wanted to stay creative on a daily basis. I started when he was just six weeks old. I don’t know what I was really thinking, but I look at it as my time for myself. It is a lot different from when I first started; at first, it was always about 10 or 15 minutes that I would spend making a piece. Even the pieces I made over the weekend were 10- or 15-minute pieces, so they’re not always super lengthy in terms of time. You’re making something and it doesn’t always have to take several hours or all day; sometimes it can just be an expression of what’s happening in the world. It’s more like documenting my journey through creativity.

APP: What is the most difficult thing you’ve encountered as a self-taught artist?

ELS: I think when you learn something on your own it’s different. I’m an oil painter, that’s my discipline, and there’s a lot of opinions around oil painting. If you know any oil painters, or if you join a Facebook oil painting group you know that they can argue about things like the type of brush for days. I’m not that kind of painter, so I kind of had to dive in and figure out what worked best for me. Maybe that’s true in a lot of art-making. Being self-taught just makes me feel like I need to work harder. Also, as far as oil painting, I feel like it has come a long way. The way that they’re making oil paints is a lot different than it was 20 years ago, so a lot of the rules might not even apply anymore. There’s a lot of different ways to do one thing; you may not have to do it the same way it’s taught.

 

APP: How do you balance being a mom and a full-time artist? Do your kids help or inspire you? Do y’all make art together?

ELS: They love to be creative and they always have a place in my studio, but I’m not super strict about teaching them. My daughter’s really creative and she loves to draw, but right now she’s really into learning Procreate and coding and how to take her drawings and transfer them onto the computer in order to make eight-year-old gifs. For example, she’ll draw a puppy and put it into the code that makes it dance. I’m getting her Skillshare for her birthday, but I don’t want to push her into professional stuff too soon. I want her to enjoy being a kid.
 

APP: I only ask because I feel like kids can bring such a unique, unclouded perspective to really everything, but art especially that can be fascinating.

ELS: Oh yeah, I always think of this quote “stay hungry, stay foolish” and that’s kind of where you want to keep your mind.
 

APP: Has your background in finance benefitted you as an artist?

ELS: Well, I know how to answer a lot of emails at once! It is helpful, it’s just different. The only thing I learned from having a conventional job is how much I enjoy being self-employed. I think I’ve been self-employed for 9 or 10 years, and the longer I am, the more it feels like I’m supposed to be here.




APP: How do you choose your subject matter?

ELS: Right now I’m painting for an upcoming show in San Francisco. With this project, and really with whatever projects I have, I’ll start thinking about my series, but I can’t paint the same thing over and over. I can’t say, “okay I’m just gonna paint this one series” for five or six days in a row. I tend to take breaks so I can paint other stuff too. That’s the thing I like about making art every day: I can paint whatever I want and I don’t feel like I have to do something in particular. I can paint whatever happens to be inspiring me that day.

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APP: What attracts you to other people’s art? What are your art and design aesthetics?

ELS: I follow so many different kinds of artists and so many different kinds of designers. My favorites are the unexpected ones. In my work, I always try to put in a surprise. I think that’s my favorite thing to see and to have that reaction of, “Oh oooo” when you encounter something really surprising. That can apply to the subject, color, proportion or perspective.

 

APP: I love the still-life aspect of a lot of your work. I feel like a contemporary still-life is so telling of the world around us. For instance, I never would have thought of a peanut butter jelly sandwich as painting subject matter. How did you come to this?

ELS: I think about what is happening around us. We’re surrounded by objects, things and everyday life and thinking, “What does all of this say about us? What does that say about our footprint right now?” I feel like artists are documenting our time right now and what’s happening in our world at the present. Even though I do a lot of still lifes, these are the things we’re holding onto today.

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APP: I find a certain lightness in your art. Do you ever feel called by the world around you to go darker with your work?

ELS: I was talking to someone at a gallery and she told me I need to be painting lighter, and that my work is starting to get dark, haha!! I have to always paint from my shoes and my viewpoint on the world. I think people are going through the journey of expressing themselves. I’m just authentic to my journey, my light, and what’s happening with me. I’m just trying to survive in my own life; I think we all are.

 

APP: I think what people started to realize recently is how much of a debt they owe to creative people for basically every source of entertainment. I find it impressive how enduring artists and other creatives have been this past year.

ELS: I think we’re lucky as artists that people are paying more attention to people online. It’s this weird place like you said before where you can’t celebrate the wins because the world is going through so much; that’s what’s hard. We’re all in this weird place of survival. Should you celebrate the wins? Yeah. Are there a lot of people hurting and going through a whole lot? Yeah. I think the world is a lot more sensitive to what people are going through and that’s definitely a good thing.


APP: You mention on your website that you are always finding something extraordinary in ordinary moments. What makes the ordinary extraordinary in your opinion? Do you have a moment that sticks out to you?

ELS: That happens all the time. I mean even on my post from the other day, I did a painting of a cheetah because my son asked me, “Where do Cheetos come from and what part of the cheetah’s body do Cheetos come from?” He’s pretty wild. It’s just stuff like that. Or my peanut butter and jelly series started because I cut my son’s sandwich wrong and he was mad at me for cutting it in a triangle and not a square.




APP: That’s great. Keep painting, we love it!

Learn more about Erika by visiting her website.

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As we enter the summer of 2021, it seems we are all breathing a little easier and enjoying a collective return to life after all the difficulties + hardships surrounding the pandemic. With this inspiration board, we aim to reflect the shift in mood by offering vibrant images full of texture and color.

We have been deeply inspired by the artists who used the quarantine to truly contemplate and explore their subjects - the artistic attention to detail is clear. You will also find glimpses of nature and cool landscape vistas that celebrate what the world looks like out there. We are certainly ready to start exploring again!

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Coming up on the vernal equinox, it’s time again to spread some seeds of inspiration. Please enjoy this Spring Inspiration Board, put together by our Visual Design Director, Sarah Knight Davis, and let us know if we can show you more work by any of these great artists.

Currently Inspired By (Quarantine Edition)…

We come to you with no offer of commitment or philosophy regarding the current global situation. Things are weird. And hard! Amy Parry Projects is just doing what we can do - working to create custom art for hospitality projects with an unbroken spirit of collaboration, love and empathy.

We know you have been absolutely inundated with messages from just about everywhere, so please accept a friendly hello and our offer of 100 new art images as we enter this new season (in more ways than one). 

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To quote Asheville-based painter Moni Hill (included here):

This virus is uncovering what is essential! Connection. Movement. Nature. Art. 

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Please note the work by Dana Montlack - turning imagery and data related to microorganisms into gorgeous photographs / Greg West - dimensional paint dabs of fun, iconic animals and people / Imi Hwangbo - meticulously cut and layered sheets of mylar / Angie McMonigal - architectural “quilt” photos captured on urban walk-abouts / Eyes as Big as Plates - a sculptural photographic series capturing 50 seniors across the globe embedded in their natural environments / Lloyd Benjamin - colorful silkscreens that capture scenes from the artists “peripatetic” youth (traveling from place to place being one of the things we simply cannot do at the moment) / Suzanne Saroff - a fun look at florals through glasses of water - something we could potentially incorporate into our involuntary home-school curriculum.

Ashley Longshore | Women's History Month

A little @ashleylongshoreart for your Friday! If you haven’t already noticed / remembered, March is #womenshistorymonth - commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in #americanhistory. Thank you Rosa, Greta, Anita, Florence, Mother Teresa + Malala.

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Happy 2020 from Amy Parry Projects!

Hope your year has started beautifully! We are feeling very inspired by the transition into a brand new decade. Please enjoy this latest selection of new, eye-catching art; our first Inspiration Board of the year.

Lots more to come!

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October is here. Let the leaves fall where they may…

We are entering the final few months of the year as inspired as ever by the work being created all around us. Collected here are 100 new pieces of art that are fresh and bold - lots of color, content and a variety of unusual materials. After all, the end of a decade is no time to be boring!

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It’s already August?!

With the revived goal of bringing you a new Inspiration Board every other month, you will really see what we are actively sourcing for our hospitality projects.

This summer we have been seeking out textile work, different types of collage and work that in general, shows a level of traditional craftsmanship. In the digital era we are living and working in, it’s cool to appreciate art that shows the artists’ hand - bonus when it incorporates or re-purposes something from nature or maybe the “good old days.”

And a good painting is always in style, right?!



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When we discover new artists or get blown away by new work from some of our old favorites, we do our best to share the work and hopefully pass on the inspired feeling. It is a very exciting time to work in hospitality design and we have enough ideas for any kind of project.

Here's to the beauty of endless possibilities!

Please let us know how we can contribute custom art to what you're working on  this summer.