About
I grew up in rural New Hampshire learning to draw and paint from my father, Lee. From my earliest memories art was a part of my life, from watching my father work to hearing about Renaissance art and architecture from my grandfather. There have been many jobs and careers and life events, but at any given moment art and art making are never far from my reach. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Middlebury College and completed the College’s Post-Baccalaureate program in 2009. In 2011 I married an amazing teacher and writer who later became an amazing mother to our two children. We all live in Gray, ME with two cats and many chickens. I am currently doing freelance illustration and teaching art at the Falmouth Middle School.
If forced to choose, I consider myself an illustrator, most recently in the realms of fantasy and science fiction, but I have worked in many mediums and with many and varied subject matter. As an illustrator I need to work with the wants and needs of clients, and as an art teacher I need to be able to pick up new tools and materials and at least look like I know what I’m doing. In the last year that has included stained glass and blacksmithing, as well as pottery and printmaking. I have often struggled with the idea that I don’t have a defined style, but I am learning to embrace the mercurial nature of my creativity and say that perhaps my “style” actually stems from a openness and interest in so many art forms, and a flexibility that allows experimentation in them all.
Gallery
Artist Statement
For our final exhibition the MAT800 cohort pared the concept and prompt down to a single word: Post. While I appreciate the flexibility and vagary that comes from a single word, there is also a specificity that is oddly intimidating. Post what, exactly? Should the work be about my teaching career? My family? My journey into the mundane intricacies of “adulting”? At the very least the work should not be be about who I was before. And therein lies the challenge, because in order to make work that isn’t about who I was, I necessarily must examine who I am now. And let’s be honest folks, no one likes doing that. But self-reflection is how we grow and change, and isn’t that what “post” is all about? Not old jobs, old apartments, old degrees. Old loves and old fights and old versions of ourselves. Everything before this moment is the past. Everything we will do next is post now. Who am I now?
The work I have been doing in recent years is predominantly fantasy and science fiction illustration, mostly pen and ink (although a great deal of it has been digital, we are talking about the future, right?) It took me awhile to be okay with that. Like the great illustrator NC Wyeth, I struggled with the idea that illustration was a “lower form of art”. But the best illustration is not one-dimensional, it should speak to the human condition and larger questions we all ask just as any piece of “fine art” would. And since I have been deep in the outer edges of space for the last year or so, I felt it made sense to draw these more personal works from the same cosmic well. The works I have contributed to this exhibition look to the road ahead. They ask the viewer to remember that the future is vast and unwritten, and where we find ourselves in its vastness at this moment does not define where we will be in a year, or five years, or ten.
On the surface level these two pieces are sci-fi images of mysterious voyagers on the edge of some unfamiliar universe. But dig just a little deeper and these works use the science-fiction genre to express my own thoughts and emotions regarding the future not only for myself as an artist, husband, and father, but the future my children face in a world that at times seems as bizarre and terrifying as any alien planet. But fear is not the message here. While the future can be frightening, stagnation is far worse. The titles of both pieces come from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, about the aging adventurer feeling the pull of the receding horizon. The hero fears boredom and decline far more than the yet unknown dangers of the future. I too hope to embrace the future, the post, whatever that may be, in all the facets of my life post now.
—Simon Adams, July 2021