Thursday, June 6, 2013

Lisa Adams / Dark Surreal Paintings

Foxhunt
1995
Lisa Adams
Dark Surreal Paintings

Queensland based Lisa Adams is a self-taught, realist artist who lives remotely on a bush property in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Working 6 hours a day, 6 days a week in her isolated studio downstairs, she produces surreal paintings depicting arresting views with occasionally improbable imagery. Although a painter for over twenty-five years, she has had only three commercial shows, as a result of her slow rate of production. Despite painting daily, she may produce only three or four paintings in a year, five during her most prolific years. It takes months to produce a single painting. Often, she would overpaint an image two or three times to get it right.


In 2009, Lisa Adams began to suffer from “a bad bout of RSI”, a product of painting with “fingers pinched around a paintbrush” every day for twenty years. But some three years later, after making modifications to her brushes and her chair, and learning to have short breaks, she is back to painting six hours a day.

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Ghost train
2004


Adams’ painstaking approach begins with a very clear mental image of the painting, which she then tries to represent on canvas. She works from detailed photographic references, preferring her own photos, often acting as a model herself, shot by her photographer husband Kim Guthrie. This is very evident from the women in her paintings that bear an unmistakable resemblance to her.

When it proves difficult or impossible for her to access and photograph a subject, she hunts out references, spending days trawling through electronic media archives, libraries and bookshops.

“I never paint from just one photograph”, she says, “it sometimes takes hundreds of separate sources.”

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Fleeing Kangaroo
2002

"Lisa Adams creates images that are often unsettling, sometimes melancholy or by turns uplifting, but always affecting and richly atmospheric. The scale on which she works affords her involved and tightly realised paintings an intimacy that echoes the personal nature of so much of the subject matter. Indeed, she explores grand emotions on a humble scale so that the very act of looking at her paintings is a revelatory and ultimately rewarding experience." 

Alison Kubler, 2004 (Curator, Public Programs QUT Art Museum)


Sparrow
2010

Twister
2009

Windy day
2008

Dead tree
2008


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Secret
2009

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On the scent
2011

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Dig 2011

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Tangle
2010

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Avalanche
2010

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Rose garden
2008

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Drift
2008

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Lovers
2007

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Divining
2007

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Vivisection
2005

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Sidesaddle
2004

Self-portrait
1993

Ship of fools
1994

Pulse
2006

Cold wind
2006

Secret
2006

Frightened crow
2005

Knots
2005

Thin ice
2004

Lovers in fog
2004

Thinking
2004

Ghost gum
2003

Burnt trees
2003

Heavy wings
2003

Spotfires
2002

Approaching Storm
2002

Lovers
2002

Falling bird
2001
SOS
2001

Laughing Jackass
2001
Black sails
2000

Track
1999
Fire-spotting tower
1999

Maze
1998

The big handicap
1998

Shipwrecked
1997

Self-portrait
1997

Wolf in sheep´s clothing
1997
Red-bellied black
1996

Startled deer
1996

Eternal Struggle
1993

Heaven and Hell
1992

Ladder
1990

Bridge
1990

?
1994

Caged Bird
1989



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