Such a landscape is idealized, unrealistically bucolic, an improvement upon nature. No rural scene could ever be this perfect. And that, says Amos, is exactly the effect she's striving for. My style is called naturalistic or realistic, but many of my paintings aren't meant to represent actual places. They aren't realistic in that sense.
Some scenes are totally imaginary.
The enhancement of nature through art has a long history in the painting of Western culture. I asked Amos why she chose to paint the world as more orderly than it really is. Her father, a gas station franchiser for Shell Oil Co., moved the family every year, sometimes more often, because of his job. Amos lived everywhere from a house abutting an orange grove in Los Angeles to an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. She attended 16 schools by the time she was 15 years old.