PAINTINGS: BLONDIE BUBBA

THE BLONDIE BUBBA SERIES

Jamie Adams searches story fictions in his family through a cinematic lens, using techniques like montage, fades and dissolves to give mythic significance. Painting with the classical beauty of glowing colors and soft curvilinear forms, he allows for unbidden, unconscious material to unfold with surprising intimacy.

Adams’ subjects are known up-close and personal, and they are loved. The artist paints his family in pleasant settings where food is shared with mythic gods and goddesses. This is a world privileged with the comfortable power of love that is found in relationships. Through Adams’ collaged and ambiguous compositions, the viewer experiences how dependent all are upon stability and reliable memory, which is more often than not blurred by expectation, desire and fear.

In the upper left corner of “Blondie Bubba Green Shirt,” Adams includes an image based upon Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, “Vertigo.” The image depicts the hero experiencing his worst fear, that of falling. Adams paints that falling man in a blurred red and inserts it into a fantasized landscape evocative of El Greco’s “Toledo.”

--excerpt from KEHINDE WILEY & JAMIE ADAMS: Major exhibits at Saint Louis Art Museum & Philip Slein Gallery; essay by Dickson Beall, West End Word, Oct 20, 2018