Opening July 1 at Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho, is Skies for a New Frontier, featuring the ethereal paintings of Victoria Adams. Adams, who has been painting for more than 30 years, is well known for her contemporary landscapes that evoke recollections of a place the viewer can’t quite place. This is because all of her landscapes stem from her own experiences and imagination.“These are landscapes that I invent,” says Adams from her home on Vashon Island, an island in Puget Sound near Seattle,Washington. “They don’t come about because I have seen an actual landscape and then gone ahead and painted it. Instead of framing fragments of the natural world I invent them. I combine and arrange a few natural elements that I know exist in the landscape and synthesize while I am working using photographs that I have taken, or sometimes I will refer to paintings done by the Old Masters and try to combine all those in a way that gives a sense of life and reality to the scene. It is a place that could exist.”Because of the way Adams arranges her works, they are non-specifi c in terms of their region.“I think that tends to give them a little bit of an otherworldly quality, an almost dreamlike quality,” says Adams. “A lot of people that see my work refer to the fact that the paintings evoke in them recollections of places they have been... they can’t quite put their finger on where they have seen them, but they have a sense of knowing the place. I am delighted with that because it means that they are captured by it somehow, and that is what I want.”Adams has added several new elements and has further enriched ones she was using before into these new works. Many of these fresh works have higher horizons, or more mountains, which increases the sense of distance; there is more emphasis on water reflections; and sometimes trees are more centrally located, becoming more dominant figures in the landscape. The 15 to 20 new works vary in size from 6 by 6 inches up to 72 by 60 inches, though Adams says she prefers to paint in a larger format and many of these larger canvases will be included in the show. There are not as many square shaped paintings as in previous groupings, but more vertical pieces and elongated horizontal works.
