Faculty portfolios

My work is generated from things that I enjoy looking at: bodies, women, my wife and children, other paintings, and film. As personal memoir, it functions as a transcription of my most intimate impressions from life, while spiraling through recurring social themes of identity and the psyche, love and desire. These concerns have led me to the solitary processes of drawing and painting and the strategy of figuration. Modes of expression, such as these, advancing notions of authorship and singularity, while requiring a great deal of attention to craft, serve aptly as markers for desire and loss.
 
The work suggests contemporary notions of identity, proposing the self as imaginary, constructed through language, or from images elsewhere. The use of mimicry and mimesis help regulate the perceived dissensions between visual appearance and the psychic self.  
 
The most recent series of jeannie paintings are based on the Godard's A bout de Souffle, which seek to reframe Patricia's (Jean Seberg) apartment as painting studio.  Seberg, the gamine, elfin-like American actress, ultimately occupies the centrality of my gaze in this series, as she embodies for me a continuum of lover, mother, and self.  The work, loosely referencing grisaille underpainting, '60s photos, the nouvelle vague, film noir, or Italian cine-fotoromanzis, proposes an inaccessible, yet jouissant vision.
 
Jamie Adams (2009)