Amiria Gale Facts

Amiria Gale is an artist and teacher from New Zealand. She is best known for her paintings of shells.

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Facts About Amiria Gale

  • Amiria Gale was born in 1979. Her father was a fisherman, and her mother was a teacher.
  • She was the eldest of six children.
  • Amiria Gale grew up in Tolga Bay, located on New Zealand’s East Coast. She spent a lot of time outdoors, playing in the sand dunes and swimming in the ocean.
  • The family relocated to a large farm in Whangara, Gisborne, New Zealand.
  • She loved making art as a child, and she experimented with paints, pencils, and crayons.
  • Amiria Gale continued to develop her artistic skills at Lytton High School, and she took on her first commissioned work at the age of seventeen.
  • She attended the School of Architecture at Auckland University, New Zealand.
  • She helped to pay for her university by selling outdoor furniture that she designed and built.
  • After university, Amiria Gale became a teacher. She taught art to all age ranges, and she ended up running Art departments in two Auckland high schools.
  • At the age of thirty, Amiria Gale left the teaching profession to pursue a career as a painter.
  • She has two daughters, and lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.

Most of my paintings are semi-abstract, with a mixture of abstract and realistic elements. As my artwork is recent, is technically considered ‘contemporary’ art.

Amiria Gale
  • Amiria Gale takes inspiration from the forms of the subject matter she is painting, often shells, landscapes, or waves.
  • She admires the work of the artists John Walsh, Zaha Hadid, Don Binney, Jill Perrott, and Jim Dine.
  • Although Amiria Gale tends to take a slightly different approach to each of the works she creates, she often paints on wooden artist boards, and she uses PVA glue to build up layers of tissue paper, textured paper, cardboard, and other found elements. She uses impasto medium to build up sections of the work, then she seals the whole surface with gesso to make it ready to paint. She then uses layers of acrylic paint, using masking tape to achieve clean edges.
  • Her artwork has been exhibited at the New Zealand art galleries Parnell Art Gallery and Art By The Sea.
  • She founded the website Student Art Guide to help students develop learning strategies and adopt the best approaches to succeeding in high school art courses and lessons.
  • Amiria Gale has also written a book to help students in school art classes called Outstanding High School Sketchbooks.