The subjects I choose to portray present a kind of visual paradox, while the compositions are rich in metaphors that describe aspects of life.
Adam Easton creates delicate still lives that are presented in such a way as to be perceived as portraits drawn from autobiographical narratives and intimate everyday moments.
Offering a contemporary rendering of Old Master compositions, these works exemplify the American artist’s refined brushwork and painterly approach. Drenched in vinaceous tones, the paintings assume an elegant yet unnerving quality, further intensified by the depiction of glass masks and suggestive of darker themes within the works.
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Overview
Though this series of works presents inanimate objects, they all appear somehow anthropomorphic; depicted with a sense of monumentality they appear provocatively mysterious.
In a disruption of the still life genre, Easton shakes many of our preconceptions, debasing the iconography of portraiture and landscape alike by creating dreamscapes which subvert our usual associations of the depicted objects. Easton himself observes that the subjects that he chooses to portray “present a kind of visual paradox, while the compositions are rich in metaphors that describe aspects of life”. The way in which Easton combines the seemingly unmergeable recalls the practice of Victor Man, whose oeuvre is similarly characterised by the displacement of elements into new narratives, reconstructing the viewer’s sense of reality.
Colour is paramount in Easton’s practice, assuming a key role in the way that the paintings are interpreted.
The artist skilfully uses colour to harmonise the subject’s features, building up veils of paint to cloak them in sombre sunset hues. Growing the compositions out of a single colour, Easton captures moods, allowing room for ambiguity as the viewers unlock memories they didn’t know they had.
Adam Easton
One who slept beside you
2022
Adam Easton
A laughter of lemons?
2022
Adam Easton
Will it grow?
2022
Adam Easton
Two painters
2022
Adam Easton
One who slept beside you
2022
Adam Easton
Even in the garden there am I
2022
“The painter’s palette as a lily pad is a wholly new kind of palette, it carries a different feeling and raises unique questions. I am focused on finding a heightened point of tension where those feelings and questions are brought to the surface.”
Though Easton manipulates light, form, and colour in an almost Impressionistic way, he still infuses the works with his own particular artistic style and fluxes of emotion, invoking a form of poetry.
Red has so much energy to it that even if the palette and contrast in the image is very limited, it retains an intense buzzing quality that sustains a tension with a muted value range. This is consistent with my overall approach of always seeking out layers of incongruities on which to construct a work.
About the Artist
Adam Easton (b. 1989) is an American artist who lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota in 2019. Easton has recently exhibited with PAPA Projects in an exhibition titled A Quiet Night, in St. Paul, Minnesota (2022). Additionally, in 2019, his work was part of the exhibitions Wine Time with The Guest Room in Hudson Valley, New York and Lobster Dinner with Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. His work was published in the 2020 Art Maze Mag Anniversary Edition, Issue 20.
Chosen Charity
It is highly appropriate for the artist to have chosen DESK, an organisation with which Adam is intimately familiar, as the beneficiary considering the unnerving crisis of homelessness, addiction, trauma, neglect and extreme poverty. We hope that viewers appreciate how Adam's work is complemented by the need to address the suffering of those in our communities and DESK's call to action.