Victoria Adams paints landscapes that are not real, stitched together from places on earth to create some place more idyllic. These depictions of land, sky and sea are the subject of a new solo exhibition at Woodside/Braseth Gallery titled "Wellspring: New Works. “I tend to work a painting looking at the direction of a light source and the position of clouds, but I’m really trying to make an ideal place, or a place that’s other, above the mundane,” Adams explains. “I don’t want it to look picturesque. Nothing I’m doing is fixed. I just keep working on it so the details look real and evoke a sense that one could enter the space and roam around.
The sky, in particular, is a point of focus in each of Adams’ landscapes. “There’s this human habit of looking upward and outward to both view the sky and to muse about the future, and I think that even though we are urban people, that part of viewing nature seems to be instinctive,” she says of the fascination. Adams notes that her paintings are a little different from landscapes that include evidence of human presence, like fences or cars. “The places that I paint are about timelessness,” she says. “They are outside of any identifiable time period. I'm promoting a sense of stillness, and retreating from viewing nature as a backdrop to some other story."
