Water Color

Artists

• Adam Sorensen

Statement

Historic Landscape painting is a lens I use to view our current relationship with a changing, yet consistently sublime natural world.  Climate change is forcing us to imagine possibilities and confront probabilities about our shifting environment, yet our human brains continue to abstract these certainties. I use this ambiguity when making my paintings. 19th Century Romantics saw the sublime as a direct connection with a higher power, and emphasized that with embellished realism. My work substitutes the higher power with irreverence and uncertainty, yet retains the exaggeration of natural beauty.  

The duality of hope and excitement, anxiety and despair inform the paintings in this exhibition.  The lockdown gave me the opportunity to develop a process driven algorithm that resulted in the geometric works in this exhibition.  Focusing on this system allowed me to maintain the physical act of working and endure the emotions that came with the pandemic.  The culmination of this practice is a series of works that evoke the human need to make despite circumstances, and implicit of existential complications. 

This sidebar allowed me to refocus and refresh my perspective towards my landscape paintings. The beauty of a chromatic vista mingles with emptiness and otherworldliness, complicating one’s reaction to the image. Much like experiencing a 65 degree day in December, it is pleasure mixed with foreboding, and is rapidly becoming our shared reality.