Artist Statement    |   Patrick Adams, January 1, 2007

The past ten years of my career have been dedicated almost exclusively to the subject of the landscape. This preoccupation has lead me in many directions in order to satisfy the various impulses in my work: my love of the changing effects of natural light, a need for gestural, painterly abstraction, and my desire to create a tactile, almost sculptural presence. The earlier works (before 2000) tended toward naturalism in my use of local color and aerial perspective. They were successful in their own way, but I felt too constrained by the demands of the naturalistic image.

In 1999 I was awarded an Al Smith Fellowship that enabled me to travel to Provence, France the following year. It was there that a vision began to form as to how I might reconcile my divergent artistic impulses.  Through some trial and error, I have arrived at a manner of working which allows the landscape to emerge as the result of a lengthy and somewhat mysterious process of discovery. The paintings begin with a very fragile idea that, like the dream that quickly vanishes once the conscious mind is aroused, shatters at the first brushstroke. The paint is then alternately layered and scraped away and color relationships explored as I try to achieve the delicate balance of elements that become unique to each image. Each painting is an attempt to give form to a vision that, I hope, transcends the particulars of place. 

What began in that tiny village in Provence as an emotional response to the landscape has become, over time, a pictorial metaphor for my relationship to the world. Though my work always begins with the landscape, it has become more about my metaphysical relationship to the landscape than a recitation of its observable facts. The formal elements, marks, textures, etc., exist on the canvas as existential signs, pointing iconographically toward the real presence of the image. The “emptying” of the image of all that is extraneous to this end creates a delicate balance between what is said and what is left unsaid. It is here, in this fragile tension, that my work finds its true meaning.

In the process of creating a painting, there remains, despite the conscious exertion of my will, a thread of the mysterious and seemingly arbitrary. This admission implies there is something that emerges in the image beyond the interaction of intellect and material. It is this discovery, or recognition, of the unanticipated that drives my work and is, in fact, its very essence.  This requires, however, that I believe that there is more to painting than the arrangement and manipulation of materials. The finished painting then becomes the manifestation, the incarnation, the evidence of my belief in the power and the inexorable mystery of images.