2016 – Deidre Adams

Bad news, good news (but no fake news)

Continuity of Intent, 36 x 36 inches, acrylic & mixed media on panel, ©Deidre Adams – SOLD

I’ll start with the bad news: As Denver locals are aware, Point Gallery closed at the end of October. This was a very sad thing for me, not only because I was represented there, but because I loved the gallery and all the other fantastic work that was shown there. It was a beautiful space, and I was very fortunate to have shown in it and to have sold some works there – the last being Continuity of Intent (above). But to everything there is a season, so they say, and now life must go on.

As they also say, when one door closes, another one opens. So for the good news, I’m excited to say that I’m now being represented by Bluestone Fine Art Gallery in Philadelphia. Many thanks to my good friend Lisa Call for the referral, and to Bluestone owner Pam Regan for taking me on.

So-Called Vital Activity, 24 x 24 inches, acrylic & mixed media on panel, ©Deidre Adams
available at Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

As 2016 winds to a close – where does the time go! – I want to thank everyone who has stuck with me through the years. While I haven’t been posting a lot here in the last couple of months, I have been busy making lots of new work. I have several new paintings in the works, and I’m also feeling inspired to try some totally new experimental things. I will be posting some of it in the coming days, so I hope you’ll stop back now and then to see what I’m up to. In the meantime, I do post lots of work-in-progress photos on Instagram and Facebook, and I hope you’ll follow me there if you’re interested.

December 20th, 2016|Art, Gallery|4 Comments

Metaphors & Mysteries opens Aug. 5 at Point Gallery in Denver

There Are No Words, 48 x 48 inches, acrylic & mixed media on panel, ©2016 Deidre Adams

This painting is part of my upcoming exhibition:

Metaphors & Mysteries

Aug. 5-31, 2016
Point Gallery
765 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, Colorado

I hope my local friends will join me for the opening reception this Friday! If you can’t make it this Friday, I will also be there giving an artist’s talk on Aug. 19, starting at 6:30. Here’s my artist statement for this show:

What does it mean to be human? Are we here as part of some grand design, put here on Earth by a benevolent creator? Or are we just the result of a random series of events involving tiny particles of space dust and electricity?

As human beings have evolved, we have developed various systems to help us make sense of our world. Language, mathematics, science, physics, artwork, music, philosophy, religion and more help us to understand, record, and communicate the lived experience of being human. Yet the more we discover, the more it seems we realize we have so much still to learn. As Carl Sagan said, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

And as we go through our lives, we feel compelled to leave traces of our existence, from the simplest hand-drawn markings on wood or stone to the most complex technological creations. We want someone else to know, “I was here.” My paintings are my own way of making sense of this world.

More information is available on the Point Gallery website.

Here are some detail views of There Are No Words:

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Adams-There Are No Words-detail-03-

Adams-There Are No Words-detail-04-

July 31st, 2016|Uncategorized|1 Comment

The Visual Field is a Container

The Visual Field is a Container, 60 x 108 inches (triptych), acrylic & mixed media on panel, ©2016 Deidre Adams

I just finished another painting in my Metaphors & Mysteries series. These works will be part of an upcoming solo show at Point Gallery, Denver, opening Aug. 5. The series is based on concepts detailed in “Metaphors We Live By,” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. (See other works in the series here and here.)

The title for this painting comes from Chapter 12, “How Is Our Conceptual System Grounded?” – page 58:

… We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world – as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities – often also as containers with insides and outsides. … We experience many things, through sight and touch, as having distinct boundaries, and, when things have no distinct boundaries, we often project boundaries upon them – conceptualizing them as entities and often as containers (for example, forests, clearings, clouds, etc.)

As in the case of orientational metaphors, basic ontological metaphors are grounded by virtue of systematic correlates within our experience. As we saw, for example, the metaphor THE VISUAL FIELD IS A CONTAINER is founded in the correlation between what we see and a bounded physical space.

If you become aware of the painting as an object, you can think of it as being rather like a window, which is a boundary within your visual field. In most but not all paintings, there is an implied continuation of the visual field which you can’t see but may imagine.

I started this painting in late 2015, so I finished it in less than a year – pretty fast for me! Here are some in-progress views:

January 2016

Adams-2016-05-20 17.22.41-
May 2016

June 2016

And some detail shots of the finished painting.

July 25th, 2016|Art, Exhibitions|Comments Off