Adam Straus

Artist Statement 

In 1986, influenced by the changing rural landscape around where I was living in Tallahassee, Florida, I made a small painting of a road at night with a McDonald’s arch poking up from the horizon. It was a departure from the large sculpture I had been making and was painted on cloth stretched over a box encased in the sheet lead I had been using on the sculpture. I called it “American Landscape” and it was a marriage between my love of the object and the image. Since then, in one way or another, I have used the traditions of landscape painting to satirize, comment on, or critique our society and our overwhelming presence in and effect on the environment. Having lived on the East End in Riverhead since 2003, my paintings have also been heavily influenced by the light, atmosphere, water, and land of my surroundings, often simply applauding this beauty. There is a desire in me, no matter how absurd, to still attempt to render the romantic sublime through landscape painting. And, I am certain that this passion for landscape painting came out of a childhood immersed in the woods, swamps, and bays of south Florida, learning about the flora and fauna along with witnessing firsthand significant changes in this landscape in a relatively short period of time. 

In the last several years these depictions of natural beauty have been disrupted by certain digitally inspired glitches to suggest a more real disruption in the natural world. Inspired by the layout and symbols of the iPhone, the save, delete, and share symbols, were added to a series of paintings of sky, water, sea, and land. A number of paintings were made of icebergs and Antarctica with blocks of color, rice paper, and washes over them along with slight breaks in the horizon lines. Often, these gliches were continued out onto the lead frames which are still a part of some of the work. 

These visual disruptions furthered after the 2016 election. I began to cover whatever surface I was going to work on, canvas, wood, or paper with the New York Times which would be both transferred and adhered directly to the surface. After creating this background of information, I would paint images of often cliché or classic landscapes–mountains, stormy oceans, our National Parks– over the news with the articles and images showing through in places. Ironically, the landscape images I work from often come off of Instagram.  For instance, an image of a missile from an article on North Korea’s missile program can be seen showing through a painting of Yosemite Valley. It has been a way to contrast the timeless with the timely. This underlying surface of information has grown to include my son’s drawings, the day to day mundane such as shopping lists and even decorative fabrics. Upon painting the landscape over this information, often the image is further disrupted with digitally inspired glitches, stenciled polka dots, washes, and other headlines scrawled in graphite. They are my interpretation of a disrupted world – politically, environmentally, and socially –  but at the same time my desire to paint away the bad news. The paintings are my attempt to point the viewer in the direction of nature and away from, but without ignoring, this constant barrage of stimuli we have created.

See Adam Straus’ full resume here.