Riverside Art Museum

Lisa Adams, one of the four artists that is showing in this fall’s exhibit, Edenistic Divergence, recently answered some questions from RAM intern Janell Glessner, about her life as a working artist.

• I believe you worked on these 2 large scale paintings for 6 months. One of them is 12 feet tall! Was this a challenge for you? How did you keep it interesting?

I worked on these paintings approximately three months each.  Because my studio is small I had to work on them one at a time which made the continuity aspect more difficult, not being able to work back and forth between the two but rather completely finish one and then begin the other. I wasn’t sure how that would turn out since that is not my normal way of working.  Generally I work on several paintings at the same time, while one is drying I can skip to another.  In this case, the paintings were large enough that I could work on one area at a time, so while one area was drying I could skip to another area within the same painting.
It’s not hard to remain interested when the picture and content of the work various so much from area to area. Over the years I’ve developed a way of treating each subject within a painting differently.  I paint each subject specifically per that subject. For example, I might treat a background loosely or with sponge rollers, then paint a flat, geometric area by taping it off, or render a bird in a very detailed manner quite realistically or use a paint pen to draw a subject. This is a method I’ve used to keep myself interested in the work and to give a kind of special nod or respect to each subject in a painting. It also makes a painting much more interesting to look at in real life.

Sometimes when I see a reproduction of a painting it looks great and then when I see the real painting I’m disappointed at the way the surface is handled. For me a really good painting operates well and keeps my interest as a viewer at various distances.  I love looking at paintings at very close range to capture the presence of the hand of the artist. That tells me so much about the engagement of the painter with their work, but then this has all got to translate from a distance especially if the painting is to be successful at a very large scale.

• As an artist in residence, you have been able to live in very different parts of the world. How have your travels and your experiences with the environment impacted your work in this exhibit?

It’s true that I have had the great fortune and privilege of living and working on residency in other parts of the world. An artist should never underestimate the power of such an experience. There seems to be two ways that artists approach residency; they can use it as a block of uninterrupted time to simply continue the work that they were already doing in their home country or they can take up the idea of truly opening themselves and imbibing a foreign and unknown environment.  I always chose to do the later so my work would be heavily informed by the place and culture in which I was working on residency.

The most profound experience for me was being on residency in Finland. Of course I learned a lot culturally about the people but the deepest impact remains the natural environment of the arctic region. In the arctic you are transported in time and given a look into how the earth,in part, was formed and that is a powerful experience.  You are also made keenly aware of the changing seasons and how visceral that experience truly is when unmitigated by human made circumstances and finally how human habitation in that part of the world respects the natural environment for the sake of survival.  It is such a different idea of the environment than how we experience living in Los Angeles or any other metropolis.

However, what directly informed the two paintings in the RAM exhibition was actually my experience of the Salton Sea not so far from Riverside. It is a place I go a couple of times a year and for me it has this terrific far away, otherworldly sensation. It  feels like a place lost and forgotten but somehow in spite of it’s lack of being cared for it continues along.  I can’t say it thrives but it persists. In my imagination, it is a glimpse into a place on the earth that exists after human devastation. The Salton Sea compels me to take that vision further and that, I think, is what the paintings are about.

• I understand that throughout your career as an artist you have transitioned between abstract and representational art. How have you incorporated these techniques into your present work?

It seems that after nearly 30 years of continuous studio practice, working through approximately a decade of abstraction and equally that of representation, the last decade has been about a fusion of the two worlds.

Though the two worlds are not entirely different in that they employ the same facility and formal aspects of painting, they feel different to me in their approach and in the mind and view of the artist as it relates to the tangible world.

Admittedly this is a difficult experience for me to explain, but in a way I can liken it to being fluent in two languages. When speaking in one language you know your mind to be a certain way but when switching to the second language, my experience is not that the words simply change but rather that the mind changes entirely.  It feels a little bit like that to me and when I reflect on this example it seems like what I am doing is creating a third language that is made of up the two, relating alternately to each but really becoming a thing unto itself. My paintings feel like a true hybrid finally.

The best example I can give is when I paint a representational subject like a tree and then I use a sponge roller to translucently blank out a part of the tree with some color. The purpose of using an element from the abstract world laid on top of a representational element serves to create an atmosphere in the picture and also to remove the viewer in a way that says “and you thought this was real?”

I think a viewer can switch it up for themselves to combine elements in whatever way they choose and this offers a lot of possibilities resulting in very different experiences of the same work.  For me this is what good art does; it’s more of a prompt than a lesson in how to experience.

• What message, if any, would you like your viewers to walk away with?
  

To be honest, I’m not a message type person, somehow that feels a little too didactic for me. I’d rather have a viewer walk away a bit confused and very thoughtful about the paintings and themselves and the world at large.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Museum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.