Phoebe Adams

Darkening Moment, by Phoebe Adams. Acrylic gouache on paper mounted on wood panel, 30 x 40″

WALKING NOMAD, a show of new work by Phoebe Adams, at David Richard Gallery in Chelsea, 508 West 26th Street, New York NY.

The essay below was written about these new paintings, and is included in the show catalog.

The catalog can be viewed here.

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PHOEBE ADAMS: NOMAD WALKING

by Deborah Barlow

“The painting is not on a surface but on a plane which is

imagined. It moves. It is not there physically at all.

It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see

is not what you see.”

—Philip Guston

These words by Guston are referenced frequently, but they still speak with a sharp clarity about what happens when a gifted hand finds its way into that imagined plane that is not just a surface. Phoebe Adams has such a hand. Her latest paintings are big-spirited, engaging and vital, each offering its own access to that other place Guston implies, a luminous and unexpected elsewhere.

Freed from the need to depict consensual reality, Adams has populated these new paintings with wildly juxtaposed colors, fractured spatiality and enigmatic forms that feel vaguely familiar and yet are not. While moderately sized, they are exploding beyond their borders with brio, spilling into the room and out into the world beyond.

In assembling her limitless trove of forms that are neither recycled nor reused (Adams describes these as “transformations of one thing to another: a merging of messy, inarticulate states”) Adams has raised her hand as if to say, please slow down. Let your eye, mind and body have time to take this all in. That slow looking makes it possible to see as a child does, to enter into these enchanted works and wander at will in a wonderland of surprises.

A disruptor by nature, Adams is constantly exploring new ways to encounter materiality and the natural world, lacing that search with a steady dose of the irrational and the irregular. “These pieces approach elegance, which is then subverted,” she pointed out. Tenaciously curious and possessing the observational exactitude of a surveillance camera, she has spent a lifetime assembling images, concepts, ideas, constructs. Her perceptivity is perpetually open, reaching outward to bring everything into play. When speaking with Adams, highly intelligent and relentlessly whimsical, associations flow freely and are in fact encouraged. As a result, it can be advantageous to approach her chimerical work by way of adjacencies and correlations.

Adams staked out a place for herself in the natural world long ago. An avid walker in Maine, New Mexico and Iceland, she is a wilderness variation of Baudelaire’s urban flâneur —that lone wanderer who finds pleasure in exploring without a schedule or a map. “I do have an aversion to paths,” she recently confessed.

These wanderings are also grist for the mill of her work. She blends the deeply personal—and often ineffable—experiences of wildness with the hard work of forging something new. It is a rarefied alchemy, this comingling and conjoining of nature and imagination, and the resulting elixir is exquisite: extraordinarily personal, idiosyncratic paintings that speak with resonance and universality.

Adams is not alone in alchemizing nature and imagination into a new view. Other artists she admires are perennial members of the Nomads Who Walk and Make Art tribe. Like Adams, Charles Burchfield spent much of his time in nature. His paintings, luminous and ecstatic, merge objects portrayed in a representational manner with their esoteric energetics. Burchfield was imaging the full landscape long before MRI technology was being used to see beneath the skin.

Burchfield’s view has resonance with Adams:

“An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.”

Tom Nozkowski was a passionate walker in the Shawangunk Ridge near his home. His blend of nature and imagination came together in small paintings that are enigmatic, dreamlike, charismatic, potent. A description by poet and art critic John Yau suits Adams as well:

“One of the underlying drives of Nozkowski’s work is to intimate the plenitude of reality while remaining rooted in its materiality; to evoke, in the compressed cosmos of his paintings, how deeply and thoroughly the resplendent surpasses the everyday.”

Both Burchfield and Nozkowski are close art kin to Adams. Her expansive, latitudinous mind (which is played out in her overflowing bookshelves) has also found resonance with writers who work in that liminal zone between nature and art making: Rebecca Solnit, Craig Childs, Barry Lopez, Merlin Sheldrake, Robert Macfarlane. These are all her essential cotravelers.

Adams has described her work as having “a sense of rapture at the density of natural phenomenon…combined with a darker view of changes and looming danger from our human interventions.” Certainly the precariousness of our earthly existence can be perceived amid the lush imagery of these paintings. But her work is neither dystopic nor without hope. Adams instead offers up a sense of how we can humbly learn about being human from the nonhuman, and what it can mean to truly love a place. As Solnit wrote, “In learning to love the Earth and particular places in it, we are learning to love back what loved us all along.”