What are your influences? Lisa Adams

"A Mechanism of Harbingers" 2008, oil on panel, 48 x 72" Lisa Adams

Lisa Adams is a painter and public artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.She is represented in LA by Lawrence Asher Gallery and in San Francisco by Michael Rosenthal Gallery
Check out her work and her influences-I had a blast looking at her choice of artists. It is a west coast view!!


"Next Services 264,458 Miles" 2008, oil on panel, 72 x 48" Lisa Adams

"The long, meandering, and challenging process that brought me to art making involved a never-quite-fulfilled reclamation of my own freedom as a woman living in the world today.

To do so my paintings must ask difficult questions of both me and of the viewer. These questions fuse my personal feelings of joy, sadness, rage, and despair – things I am often afraid to look straight in the face - with larger concerns of spiritualism, pathos, and the strangely complicated and enigmatic discourse between human beings.

The images that appear and reappear in my work stem from a desire to suffuse sources of inchoate matter – the formal elements, the grist of art – with a deeply felt, psychologically-charged world-view, which in turn allows my personal integrity to merge with larger, more universal concerns, cathartic to me, accessible to the viewer

In my most recent work, I create a negotiated reality forged from the world of the imagined—images of a Ground Zero (rather than Edenic) natural world with urban artifacts--to create a largely graffiti-free netherworld, animated by a tension between the unexpected and the predictable. By creating a “safe” space for myself in which to imag­ine, I offer the viewer an opportunity for Koan-like contemplation, a moment not Here nor There but somewhere In-Between."

"Everyone Talks' 2005, oil on panel, 30 x 34 Lisa Adams

Here is her list of 10 influences:

1) Nature--just being out in nature to experience a world of beauty and tragedy beyond my control.

2) Birding--watching birds in their natural habitat. It allows me to sit still and put my attention on silence and minutia, much like a meditation and I just love looking at the colors and hearing the sounds of songbirds specifically.

3) Film--so many films inspire me in different ways depending on mood. Film is my great escape. For me any of the films of Werner Herzog remain the most meaningful and inspiring.

4) Meditation--a dedicated practice of simply following the breath.

5) Travel--having traveled extensively throughout the world alone, there are so many places that have stayed with me but the most profound places are in the Nordic countries, the very top of Norway and Finland where the Sami people reside.

6) Other painters--again there are so many painters I take great inspiration from. Here are a few: Kristen Calabrese. She is a big inspiration and seeing her work in the studio always makes me want to paint better.
Also the work of Lucian Freud, Kiki Smith, Mathew Barney, William Kentridge, John Currin, Susan Rothenberg, Jeff Wall, Robert Gober, Amy Sillman, Llyn Foulkes, David Amico, Tom Wudl, Tomory Dodge, Joshua Aster, Kim Dingle, Samantha Fields, Cole Case, Andre Yi, Marie Thibeault, Joe Biel, Ann Diener and many dead artists such as Max Ernst, Philip Guston, Jay Defeo, Henri Matisse, Van Gogh, William Blake, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and many more.

7) Imagined Apocalyptic Events-- mostly these come to me in dreams though I do have conscious anxiety about apocalyptic events. Perhaps this is the result of being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Though these events frighten me they also give me energy and provides me with one extreme scenario against which I can weigh the other extreme of beauty, stillness and feelings of well-being.
8) Natural Disasters — love watching floods, fires, earthquakes, Tsunamis, etc I think it’s the out-of-control aspect of these events that capture my imagination.

9) Surrealism— my first love in painting was surrealism. At age ten I saw a reproduction of Dali’s painting “The Persistence Of Memory” and a knew I would be an artist, though I didn’t know what that really meant at age ten. As I later came to learn, it was the notion of the subconscious that drew me in.

10) Psychotherapy— having had many years of psychotherapy, it’s clear that this investigation has had a profound influence on my life and my work. The realm of subconscious material, unlocked memories and childhood trauma have tacitly informed my work and offered both and personal associations to my audience.

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