It’s been nearly 20 years since I first met Lisa Adams and came upon her work at the 1993 L. A. Art Fair.  Adams had been commissioned to paint BMW’s latest North America floor-show “ArtCar” and I was working the fair as a budding art and design writer.  To this day, I remember Adams had made a single bold stroke — bold more in the way of laying paint on a slick surface as if to at once celebrate and violate BMW design principles!

While today’s digital screen image begs the question of reading how paint adheres to a surface, Adams stands out as one of the 21st artists dedicated to making painting an active space for spacious, mindful, neurons-sparking perception of strokes and images both simultaneously bold and intimate.  How do we hold the dualism?, the artist appears to ask.  As a practitioner of Buddhist contemplative practice — the Soto Zen Tradition — Adams takes non-duality and mindfulness into direct and intimate engagement with the act of seeing the world as it is, here and now.  Below, in her own words, with images produced between 2009-2010, the artist highlights the coupling of seeing & knowing:

Lisa Adams, There's No Place Like Home, 2010, 48 x 40 in. Oil and spray paint on panel

In his book The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi, an Hungrian philosopher, posits that we know more than we think we know. His term “tacit knowing” describes a state in which all humans function on a daily basis: For example, how is it that we can instantly recognize our loved-one or friend in a crowd of a hundred people, each of whom has a similar physical structure? Simply put, because our mind relies on tacit knowing to make decisions and illuminate understanding. [Ed. note: Contemporary neuroscience can now offer research evidence as to how we pattern recognize.]

I paint a dynamic space that calls on this tacit knowing. The space of these paintings demands viewer participation in a highly charged mental fashion — one that enlists the mind to patter through an endless succession of questions, leading to an inner sense — ‘I think I’ve got it, or maybe not.’ All this and more happens in the flash of an eye while in fact, nothing has actually happened.  My paintings can be viewed as snapshots, frozen images that cue the mind to work.

Lisa Adams, In Anticipation of Aberrancy. 2009, 48 x 60 in. Oil and spray paint on panel

Typically I ask ask more questions than provide answers.  I am intrigued by the interface between humans and the natural world and visions of life after life:

Is this how the world would look without us or because of us?

What persists in spite of natural evolution and natural destruction?

Do these archetypal images arise as part of our brain chemistry?

Do they arise as a result of pondering the existance of Earth post-human?

All art work functions similarly in that if a viewer responds, it is because they see themselves in the work. The gift of art is that as a viewer, there are many things we cannot experience about ourselves except in the presence of art.

To learn more about Lisa Adam’s art practice, go to http://www.lisamakesart.com/

Lisa Adams, Convocation. 2009, 72 x 120 in. Oil on panel