Amy Solovay's Bio
Amy Solovay is a professional artist with a textile design background. She lives in southern California, and her art is influenced by Los Angeles’ fashion scene as well as by the influential interior designers who live and work in the city. During her career in the textile industry she designed fabrics for both the fashion and home furnishings markets. Because of this, she describes her work as “Art Inspired By Fabric, Fashion and Interior Design”.

Previously, Amy was Director of Design for a Los Angeles-based upholstery fabric manufacturer, where her customers included prestigious to-the-trade only interior design showrooms as well as some of the world’s largest furniture manufacturers. Before that, she worked as a freelance textile designer, designing fabrics and colorways for many of Southern California’s best-known brands including Roxy, Guess, Sideout, Big Flirt and many others.

Amy is passionately interested in fashion and its history. She is also skilled in the related crafts of sewing, knitting, crochet and lace making. She is an avid collector of vintage fashion magazines and needlework pattern books, often buying them, reading them and then offering them for sale again in order to buy more.

Amy is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. She has instructed aspiring fashion designers at California Design College (One of the Art Institutes) where she taught courses in trend forecasting and surface design. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia.
Amy Solovay's Artist Statement
My first job in the textile industry was creating colorways for fabric- basically taking patterns that already existed and re-coloring them so that they would look new. The senior designers often assigned me to work on the projects from the most difficult customers, people who did not have good color sense and would ask for bizarre color combinations. It was a challenge for me to use their color choices to come up with wearable fabrics, yet I grew to enjoy it. I still draw inspiration from that time in my life; I am intrigued by the idea of trying to make "clashing" colors look like they belong together. I have found spin painting to be an outstanding vehicle for this kind of expression. These pieces usually manifest themselves as small works- frequently they will be sized at 2.5” x 3.5”, otherwise known as art trading cards or ACEOS.

I also enjoy using spin art to explore more harmonious color combinations, from the traditional to the contemporary. In my larger work, I strive for beauty, harmony and “live-ability”- work that I feel people would love to live with, to enjoy, to revel in, to be enraptured by.

One of my artistic goals is to push spin art to new levels of creativity. I enjoy thinking of different creative ways to reinterpret spirals and circles. They often find their way into my original paintings, collages, mixed media pieces, and assemblage art as part of a larger statement. I adore geometry, and spin art is one approach that I enjoy using to create abstract geometric artwork.

While my primary focus is currently on creating abstract art, I also enjoy painting florals and botanicals, particularly tropical flowers inspired by California surfwear. I also enjoy creating contemporary designs inspired by the American Southwest. Lately I have also been creating paisleys, medallions and damasks. The inspirations for these designs are all rooted in my background as a textile designer. Since I am still obsessed with fabric and repeating patterns, it is likely that I will draw on these inspirations for quite some time to come.