Interview with Artist Lisa Adams

AHC: Can you tell us a bit about your process, themes & inspirations?

​Lisa: Like any artist who has been practicing a long time, my process, themes and inspirations have changed over the years.

For the past ten years my process involves using images from my immediate environment as well as those conjured from my imagination. Ranging in scale from twelve inches to twelve feet, I always paint in oil on a smooth surface, either on canvas or panel or canvas stretched over panel. I include both representational imagery as well as abstraction.

Reoccurring themes in my work are that of the natural environment and the human-built world, their collision and ultimate integration, if only by default. Rather than presenting a factual narrative, my work uses metaphor, perception, and imagination to merge my experiences of these worlds into a new, post-urban reality.
 

Dark Star 2014-15
oil on canvas over panel
60 x 84 inches


My inspirations are many, from simple things in nature like a pinecone, to something more impactful like the landscape of the Salton Sea. I am drawn to images of renewal and beauty that might emerge from an imagined post-apocalyptic world. It’s the combination of natural beauty and evidence of human disruption that peeks my imagination.

​I have found a way to accommodate, meld, and come to terms with these disparate worlds. My work consolidates and then describes the role that memory and what I call slow time play in my emotional responses to my physical environment.
 

Caput Mortuum 2015
oil and spray paint on canvas over panel
40 x 42 inches


AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create?

Lisa: Having been a very obsessive child, I came to art quite young, maybe two or three years old, so I’m told. My earliest memories at about age five, were of laying under the dining room table and chairs and creating intense drawings of animals, cars, roads, trees and houses, in pencil, on the underside of the furniture. I was also fond of collecting categories of images from magazines, like birds or eyes, carefully cutting around each image and gluing them down on construction paper in straight rows. I was always busy but hadn’t yet called myself an artist.
 

Borderland
oil on canvas over panel
60 x 144 2015


When I was ten, I saw a reproduction of Salvador Dali’s painting, The Persistence of Memory, in a library book at school. I’d never seen anything like it and remember thinking to myself, “Wow there are people out there who think like that?” In an attempt to make similar work, I did a bunch of drawings of melting clocks and put them in cheap, little gold frames and hung them on the wall in my room. It was at that point I called myself an artist even though I’m not sure I knew what that really meant. No one in my family or neighborhood were artists.
 

The Mire of Epiphany 2013
oil on panel
48 x 60 inches


AHC: Who are some of your influences?

​Lisa: There are so many! I would have to say some of the surrealist painters, such as Max Ernst or Salvador Dali, the DADA artists Duchamp and Picabia, the Russian Constructivists, the Bauhaus theater of Oskar Schlemmer, the films of Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, science fiction writers Phillip K. Dick and James Howard Kunstler, more contemporary artists like, Susan Rothenberg, Philip Guston, Llyn Foulkes, Kristin Calabrese, Robert Gober, Jenny Saville, Albert Oehlen, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Kelly McLane, Henry Taylor, Jon Rafman, and on and on.

Portentous Rhapsody 2013
oil on panel
20 x 48 inches

​
AHC: Where do you find the inspiration for your pieces?  

​Lisa: Inspiration is a curious thing and I rarely think in terms of inspiration. For me it’s more like just being in the world with the eyes and mind of a keen observer. One of the tools I use to observe the world is my iPhone. Though I would never consider myself a photographer, I take a lot of photos of things I see in my immediate environment in downtown LA, like graffiti, concrete, asphalt, architectural detail and homeless encampments. That said, I also have a direct experience of nature by spending time in Griffith Park, at the L.A. River and in the Angeles National Forest, which is only about a 45 minutes drive. 

​Esperanza Valley 2015
oil on canvas over panel
60 x 72 inches


In the1990s and 2000s, I traveled extensively and travel is always a great resource—new languages, cultures, landscapes, buildings, food. etc. I would love to go to Iceland one day.
​

Drowning Out All Birdsong 2013
oil on canvas over panel
65 x 84.5 inches


AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about?

Lisa: This October my work will be included in a group exhibition at the Santa Monica College Barrett Gallery titled Collaborations, curated by Kirk Pedersen, publisher at ZERO+ Publishing. This exhibition includes work by all the artists who have had monograph books published by ZERO+ and I’m very proud to be part of this group.

In January, 2017 I will have a small exhibition of small paintings at CB1 Gallery, who represents my work in Los Angeles.

​Lastly, in February at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California there will be a small survey exhibition of my paintings that spans the past five years.
 

We Don’t Kare 2015
oil on canvas over panel
48 x 60 inches


Photo of Lisa Adams 
photo credit: ©2016 Jayme Odgers

All other images © Lisa Adams

Lisa Adams is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles 

To see more of Lisa's work and for further information visit her website at http://www.lisamakesart.com