General 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. Each painting is an attempt to give form to a vision that, I hope, transforms the particulars of place into a singular manifestation of the Beautiful.

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