Adam Shaw was born in New York City. His textured and luminous oil paintings are infused with the beauty of the natural world. Informed by a lifelong study of art history, his true and enduring teachers are nature itself and the vital materiality of paint. While firmly rooted in tradition, he is continually engaged in exploration and expanding in new directions.

Often blurring the boundaries between abstraction and representation, Shaw’s atmospheric paintings are at once familiar and mysterious. Through the density of paint we feel a heightened connection to the natural world. Although difficult to categorize, among the many directions he has explored, are works which can be loosely referred to as landscapes, flowers, trees, and paintings using language as a visual element.

Bringing a diverse educational background to his work, Shaw is a non-practicing physician, who began as a poet, and has dedicated himself solely to painting and sculpture for the past two decades. His love of language, poetry, philosophy, and physics has found its way into many of his paintings, often juxtaposing Buddhist scripture, song lyrics and physics equations in the same work,

Shaw’s process involves the application and removal of multiple layers of paint, and a single work may take years to complete. Informed by a lifelong study of esoteric philosophy and eastern spiritual traditions, the lush textural surfaces retain a remarkable luminosity and visceral record of his day-to-day painting practice which offers a glimpse into a life of spiritual exploration.

Shaw has been widely exhibited in the United States in galleries, museums and many public spaces. His work is in hundreds of private and corporate collections throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia. The artist lives and works in northern California.

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