It all started when…

Patrick Adams grew up on the wind-swept prairie of southwest Minnesota. It was there that he came to love the vast, light-filled landscapes that are now the dominant subject of his work. He moved with his wife and children to Lexington, Kentucky to attend the graduate school of the University of Kentucky, where he was awarded the Master of Fine Arts degree in 1992. Adams has twice been awarded the prestigious Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, which allowed him to travel to Provence, France, where he laid the foundations for a body of work that he has continued to build upon over the last 17 years. His work can be found in many private and corporate collections, such as the James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute (Columbus, OH), Mayo Clinic (Jacksonville, FL), Hilliard Lyons (Louisville, KY), and Gaylord International Convention Center (Washington, DC). Adams serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky and Asbury University.

Artist statement 

How does one describe a vision? Can you put into words what is image alone? Is it possible to translate an idea worked out within the limits and potentialities of visceral material into the disembodied medium of the intellect? More to the point, can you describe a painting, with all its viscous labors, nuances, and randomness, its fickle and tremulous light?

Images, beyond their objective references, are a tangle of symbol and metaphor, subjectivity and universal truths. Their power lies precisely in their ability to circumvent our rational minds in order to present to us a vision of something unexpected, immanent, and beautiful. To attempt to explain, quantify, or demystify this experience is to render the artwork powerless. Each painting is an attempt to give form to a vision that, I hope, transforms the particulars of place into a singular manifestation of the Beautiful.

In the process of creating a painting, there remains, despite the conscious exertion of my will, a thread of the mysterious and seemingly arbitrary. This admission implies there is something that emerges in the image beyond the interaction of intellect and material. It is this discovery, or recognition, of the unanticipated that drives my work and is, in fact, its very essence. This requires, however, that I believe that there is more to painting than the arrangement and manipulation of materials. The finished painting then becomes the manifestation, the incarnation, the evidence of my belief in the power and the inexorable mystery of images.

So, I leave you with these paintings, these material poems, these facets of light and color, as evidence of my journey. The trajectory of this journey, is marked, at intervals, by these attempts to describe what is always just beyond my vision; yet each of these efforts, I truly believe—I must believe—, holds within itself the key to a vision of such beauty and perfection that its final revelation will leave us speechless and uncomprehending.