Anthony Amos was born in Bristol in 1950. He joined the Merchant Navy at 16, working on trawlers, tugs and deep-sea cargo ships. He returned for a short while to his home town to help in the restoration of Brunel’s SS Great Britain. Throughout his travels he filled hundreds of sketchbooks with drawings and detailed notes.
He moved to Devon in the nineties where he painted full time. He opened his studio in Totnes in the early 2000s. He was also a prize-winner at the Royal Society of Marine Artists and exhibited in several galleries.
His work became very popular in this time and his paintings sold quickly to the lucky customers who called in to his studio where they often found pictures stacked on the floor unframed. It’s not unusual to find another painting on the back of one of his seascapes. He painted quickly and without thought to value. He was serious about his work but humble and was delighted that his found a wide audience.
Amos developed his own unique style of painting. He used water-mixable oils, often mixed with bitumen, and preferred to paint with his fingers and bits of rag, scoring the surface and often leaving thumb prints on the hard white board.
Sadly, he died in 2010 after a short illness, at the height of this powers.
