Lisa Adams Essay
#1 Shane Guffogg (The Visiting Painting)
#2 Lisa Adams (Responce Painting)
At first I felt lost in connecting to someone else’s painting as a touchstone. It felt very strange not doing another one of my own paintings and my response called up parts of me from the past that at times felt frustrating and uncertain. The experience of creating a work that was not exclusively about my terrain felt distressing at times. I followed suit with the idea of process painting which I felt coming directly from the given painting and therefore my piece felt mostly about the process.
By doing a process painting, I had gotten myself into territory that I had long ago left behind. I felt the struggle. I imposed a lot of will onto the work in an attempt to compensate for feeling uncomfortable. I used spray paint almost entirely on this work with some oil painting as a foundation along with paint pens and a layering technique. The layering technique was a response to the layering expressed in the given painting. The given painting is non-representational, a genre I hadn’t worked in for well over a decade. Gradually I started to melt and feel a transmission from the given abstraction. The transmitted sensibility was one of a season, summer to be exact, in an urban environment.
Once I felt I had a sense of the work, my response was to move in the opposite direction, that of winter and a natural environment. Automatically, I created delicate snowflake stencils cut out of paper reminiscent of a grade school art project which felt very freeing and exhilarating. In the given work there appeared to be a fuzzy veil over the abstract images. I saw this as a filter through which the viewer was asked to experience the images. My reaction was one of an interruption of the visual plane. By overlaying stripes across the entire surface of the painting I created a look much like the experience of rushing by a fence and seeing the
landscape beyond, like a Muybridge effect. Whereas the given painting feels soft in focus and attitude, I responded with a cold and hard-edged attitude.
In wanting to stay within the guidelines of my agreement with the curators, I did not realize how difficult this project would be. It was a very interesting process in this way and I had to rely on trusting myself more than anything else. Trusting that I would not depend on my usual solutions, saying fuck it and just make a painting the way I usually make a painting. I resisted the impulses and, assuredly, they were strong. Ultimately the project was a gift in that it allowed me to explore solutions to questions I don’t usually ask.