Amanda Means

"Our cobblestone farmhouse, built in the early 1800s, was constructed with small palm-sized stones naturally rounded by water from the shores of Lake Ontario,"[1] she has said, adding that she slept in a treehouse in the summer, and spent much time alone in the woods and fields.

[1] Means left the family farm to study art in New York City, where she was influenced by painters of the Abstract Expressionist Movement such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko.

[citation needed] Known for her camera-less images, Means often uses a technique similar to the darkroom process which creates photograms, but is uniquely her own.

For both her Leaves and Flowers series (both ongoing, begun in the 1990s) she places the botanical subject on a piece of glass in the head of the photographic enlarger.

[2] Scott Hall describes the effect of these techniques: "Her transformation of ordinary household objects into sublime Minimal art is not only evident in the bulb series, but also in the black and white prints of water glasses...