Patrick Adams | Featured Artist

March 5, 2024

About the Artist

Patrick Adams work is confirmation to the power of visual language, exploring realms that words alone cannot adequately capture. Adams' artistic process is a delicate dance between conscious creation and serendipitous discovery. His canvases serve as portals, inviting viewers to circumvent their rational minds and experience the unexpected, the immanent, and the sublime. At the heart of Adams' practice lies a profound respect for the mystery inherent in the creative process. He embraces the unanticipated elements that emerge during his work, recognizing them as essential to the artwork's power and authenticity. This approach results in paintings that are not mere arrangements of material, but incarnations of belief in the inexorable mystery of images.

Adams' oeuvre can be understood as a series of "material poems" - each a facet of light and color that marks a waypoint on his artistic journey. These works are not intended to be explained or demystified, but rather experienced in their full, unquantifiable glory. They stand as evidence of Adams' unwavering pursuit of a vision that perpetually hovers just beyond the horizon of perception.

patrick — "Light Under Pressure" | 42x48 | Oil Painting

Landscape Paintings

"I have been painting images of the landscape for over twenty years now in an attempt to convey the experience of being in this vast, ever-changing space of light and form. However, I am not interested in simply producing a painting with a likeness to a particular place. What does interest me is expressing my existentially confirmed experience of a place; or, perhaps I should say, its essence. This is why I return to the same handful of places over and over again. These places are inexhaustible sources of inspiration because each experience of them is unique." - Patrick Adams

Artist Statement

"How does one describe a vision? Can you put into words what is image alone? Is it possible to translate an idea worked out within the limits and potentialities of visceral material into the disembodied medium of the intellect? More to the point, can you describe a painting, with all its viscous labors, nuances, and randomness, its fickle and tremulous light?

Images, beyond their objective references, are a tangle of symbol and metaphor, subjectivity and universal truths. Their power lies precisely in their ability to circumvent our rational minds in order to present to us a vision of something unexpected, immanent, and beautiful. To attempt to explain, quantify, or demystify this experience is to render the artwork powerless.

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.

So, I leave you with these paintings, these material poems, these facets of light and color, as evidence of my journey. The trajectory of this journey, is marked, at intervals, by these attempts to describe what is always just beyond my vision; yet each of these efforts, I truly believe—I must believe—, holds within itself the key to a vision of such beauty and perfection that its final revelation will leave us speechless and uncomprehending."

- Patrick Adams