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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