Student Spotlight: Amber Sevilla
“I like to create introspective work, to use my paintings as an attempt to fully capture a complex emotional theme within myself. Often, the process of conceptualizing a painting and bringing it to completion when it is based on my own personal experience feels like solving a puzzle. I like to find the exact visual elements and compositions that represent what I am going through at the time, that replicate the sensations that I experience.” – Amber Sevilla
Emotional potency is a strength of Amber Sevilla’s artwork. A graduating senior of the High School of Art and Design and Seeds of the League Scholar, Sevilla is an artist who feels deeply. Her artwork oscillates between an outward expression of care for loved ones and an introspective lens into her own personal struggles. In her words, “I’ve learned to love how intensely I can feel, and what I used to be most ashamed of has now become the core of my work.” Guided by personal themes, Sevilla turns the phrase, “you’re so sensitive” into a conceptual framework on shared intimacy.
Inspiration for many of her works comes from an innate connection to gratitude and an intrinsic awareness of self. She describes the process of conceptualizing her works as a practice of mindfulness, explaining, “I’ve been training myself more to be in the present moment… I’ll be taken over with my desire to capture even the small, mundane moments with [loved ones], because I want to memorialize the relationship that we have.” Moments like these have become the thematic underpinning of paintings and sculptures, such as a recent mixed-media installation showcasing a delicate moment between her parents sharing a spoonful of ice cream.
The conceptual meaning behind an idea often precedes the visual elements of her artwork, with writing acting as a foundational tool in the early stages of a new work. “When I get an idea,” she explains, “it’s a scramble to get to my sketchbook and jot down everything.” She then turns to tools like Photoshop to visualize her ideas. Thoughtfully working through her emotions, ideas, and different forms of representation allows Sevilla to achieve works with visual and thematic depth.
Tulog Na (Sleep Now), 2024. Oil paint on canvas.
For Sevilla, who is primarily a painter, textural qualities of the paint are important to her expressionistic style. The possibility for transparency with oil paint evokes what she describes as, “different levels of meaning and a sense of displacement.” Her watery and layered rendering of subjects echo the ephemerality to the moments she captures, evident in paintings such as, “my fathers eyes” and “do you really believe that.”
Expanding on the role technique and process play in her work, Sevilla expresses an unfiltered excitement when asked what creating without limitations might look like for her. She describes her vision in great detail:
“If I could create something without any limitations, I’d want to create something pretty large, around 6 feet by 7 feet. I’d have a huge studio where nothing was precious, everything could be covered with paint. I’ve been really drawn to abstract expressionism lately, and I love the idea of using really wet oil paint and being able to throw it onto the canvas. I want to take thick brushes, load them up with watered down oil paint, and use them as tools to throw the paint onto the canvas. I think it would be cathartic. I’m interested in the expressiveness of brush strokes and markings, in how much you can say with the way that you paint, not just what you paint, and since I’ve been wanting to explore the idea of anger or rage more in my work, I love the idea of having a space where I can get as violent with my painting movement as I want. I want to make angry slashes across the surface and slam open buckets of paint to see what shapes I can get. Afterwards, I would paint into it, creating transparent overlapping figures that would interact with all the abstract shapes underneath.”
do you really believe that?, 2024. Oil paint on canvas.
my father’s eyes, 2024. Oil paint on canvas.
And yet, there are no boundaries to Sevilla’s creative expression as her practice evolves beyond painting to mixed-media and sculpture. A student of Deborah Winiarski’s Mixed Media, Collage and Assemblage course at The League, questions of physicality, material, and form are taking new shape for the young artist.
Like the transparency Sevilla employs in her paintings, material choices using mixed-media are both “intentional and rooted in sentiment.” She describes, “If my work is about my love for my family and my home, I’ll do my best to exclusively use materials from my home.” In the work, “skin and soul,” the empty skincare boxes that make up an outer layer of the sculpture are a material closely connected to the conceptual meaning of the piece and a reference to her own consumption practices related to the skincare industry.
The work emerged from Sevilla’s growing fascination with skincare and her critical reflection on how the multi-billion-dollar industry shapes perceptions of beauty and self-image, particularly for young women and girls. As she began saving used skincare packaging, she considered how these empty containers could symbolize the polished exterior marketed by the industry, while the layered imagery could evoke the deeper, often vulnerable, reality of those who consume its promises. Suspended in space, the multi-dimensional sculpture consists of two distinct yet interwoven layers: an outer shell of hand-stitched skincare packaging and an inner layer of photo-transferred images of Sevilla’s friends tugging at their skin, arranged on small canvas squares.
skin and soul, 2024. Mixed Media.
For Sevilla, every visual decision carries meaning. Why are there different layers in the piece? Why are the images of the girls in the background? These guiding questions transformed the empty boxes and images into a sculpture that reflects a deliberate conceptual framework: the boxes representing the outward “skin,” while the images of women behind them embodying the “soul”—the human essence shaped and affected by societal beauty standards.
Through the process of transferring digitally printed images onto a canvas surface, the photographs take on a hazy, soft quality similar to the effect achieved in her paintings. The transfers themselves are peeling in spots, revealing the canvas underneath, an effect that offers a reference to the tearing of skin. Juxtaposing this is the meticulous stitching holding the skincare boxes together, echoing the promise of mending through the products themselves.
Sevilla’s creative process embraces both intentionality and spontaneity. While the conceptual backbone of the piece is guided her choices, unexpected moments—like the natural sway and spin of the suspended images—led her to consider how movement might reflect the transient quality of the soul. This integration of materials, symbolism, and process invites viewers to interrogate the deeper implications of an industry often preoccupied with surface-level perfection.
Embracing the potential to be surprised by new materials and unexpected outcomes of her processes has expanded the boundaries of Sevilla’s practice. In the future, she expresses a desire to continue exploring nontraditional methods of creating, such as printmaking techniques, encaustic monotypes, gel plate transfers, and emulsion lifts with polaroids. “I’ve been a fine artist for most of my life,” she explains, “I’m really eager to branch out and find new interesting ways to express my ideas.”
Today, Sevilla describes her work as falling into two categories: intimately introspective in the form of self portraiture, or outwardly reflective, highlighting the “mundane moments” with people she loves. However, “skin and soul” is a departure from this binary, offering a personal struggle expressed through the lens of shared experience with her closest friends. Sevilla’s practice demonstrates possibilities of creative expansion found at the margins of the binaries we create for ourselves. Both her paintings and mixed-media work defy categorization, taking on new forms and offering opportunities to create collective meaning at the edges of individual experiences.
skin and soul, 2024. Mixed Media.
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Amber was first connected to the Art Students League of New York through her high school illustration teacher, Mr. Harrington, a longtime League artist who, like many of his students, found the League early on in his artistic career. She has taken classes in painting from life with Jerry Weiss and Garin Baker and most recently, studies Mixed Media with Deborah Winiarski.
