Caroline Adams
Caroline Adams grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. She spent three years studying and teaching printmaking and bookmaking at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Greece. She also spent two years in Quito, Ecuador painting. Caroline has shown at numerous galleries worldwide, including Metaxa Gallery in Paros, Greece; Illeana Viteri Gallery in Quito, Ecuador; Artists' House Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; Shelburne Art Center in Vermont; the Yellow Springs Historical Society in Pennsylvania; Somerville Manning Gallery and Hardcastle Gallery in Delaware. Caroline has lived in Washington, DC on and off since 2003 while not abroad with her husband, a Foreign Service Officer. Caroline now lives in Bogotá, Colombia with her husband and two children.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Every time I move somewhere new -- every four years or so -- I spend time feeling disconnected. Why did I go so far away? Where do I really belong? Can I reinvent myself in this new place? I paint my way toward the answers. This is especially true with my egg tempera paintings. Egg tempera doesn’t glide around the way oil does. It doesn’t abide being moved from here to there, or wiped off the canvas to try another direction. Egg tempera hits the panel and stays put. There is a solidity, a rooted-ness to it. In order to build an egg tempera landscape, I sit for hours laying down line after line, layer upon layer. If I work long enough, the unfamiliar language and customs around me fall away. And I’m someplace else. Someplace I’ve made, someplace that draws on the memory of all the places I have traveled and lived and made my home. Sometimes, it’s a glimpse of sky in a faraway place. Other times, it’s a field that I saw a thousand times as a child. This has been a hard couple of years to be away from home. Lots of things have changed and are changing still. I hope that these reflections of my visual experience will bring you to a time you remember, somewhere familiar or, if needed, just someplace else.
Sea, land, and sky. These most basic elements of the natural world captivate me. A band of light dances across the surface of the water. A shadow defines the edge of a mountainside. A shift of color marks the sky below and above the clouds. These relationships of light, line, and color are my experience of a landscape, and they return when I sit in my studio to paint. These paintings come from simple ingredients: Memory and imagination. Sea, land, and sky.