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Mein Vater is Mein Vater

Adam Lee Shaw

Allow me first to state that I wish to be an honest person under all and any circumstances. Honest meaning regarding my fellow humans as importantly as they truly are to my life. I know that this cannot be done, but that does not trouble me, for the unfullfilable journey towards that goal is what will be my life…however, I believe that I can come closest to being that honest through the language of art. A language that I choose. I know that my father is my father, that I am going to lie in the future, and make mistakes, and there are difficult times ahead…but art helps. Art resuscitates life. And that's why I do it.

I create visual language using the mediums of printmaking and drawing. More specifically within printmaking, the techniques of etching and linoleum cuts, and within drawing, charcoal and pastels. Honestly, I don't know if there is anything in art I value more than simply the work of the human hand. This is certainly evident in the medium of etching, as well linoleum cuts, although their languages are different. I enjoy switching from the discreet lines of etching to the emboldened marks of linoleum cuts. Charcoal and pastels are the materials I most often utilize in my drawings - I feel their qualities fall somewhere in-between the effects I utilize from etching and linoleum cuts.

To speak briefly on content, my images predominantly deal with the contemplative nature of isolation, and its connection to humanity's ideas of divinity. Not only literal isolation, but also the existential isolation that truly never leaves us. The artists I've looked to in shaping my sensibilities include Odilon Redon, Käthe Kollwitz, Odd Nerdrum, and Edvard Munch, among others. I want my images to seem overwrought, I want them, as Odd Nerdrum said when referring to the transcendent in kitsch, to be "about the eternal human questions, the pathetic, whatever its form, about what we call <<the human.>> The task of kitsch is to create a seriousness in life, at its best so sublime it will bring the laughter to a quiet." Or, as when Edvard Munch said: "We want more than a mere photograph of nature. We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want to create, or at least lay the foundations of, an art that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one's innermost heart."