“People are the only things as interesting as paintings.”

Figuration has a natural, elemental connection to the art of painting; there is something primal and enduring about crafting an image to reflect or resemble or somehow totemism a human being. That said, I’m always in a state of doubt about how to accomplish it. I like that Barnett Newman “tried to start from scratch, as though painting had never been done before.” That’s the attitude I want to bring to figurative painting; starting every painting from a place of not knowing how to paint a person, not knowing how to paint anything. 

The art of painting should be able to accommodate any mode of expression; narrative, allegorical, political, symbolic; and it should be able to serve as a vehicle for any passions, loves and hates and irritations and exalted states of being. Painting is a wide open ground that encompasses and extends beyond the entire canon, rather than a distillation of it into to some kind of monolithic essence. And insofar as painting is an act, I believe that the “act-ion” is a fundamental element of whatever is produced. If painting is a surface, it’s an entire surface; the ground as much as the figure. The real fascination lives where materiality, gesture and figure intersect; where seeing/experiencing becomes tactile, and looking becomes touching becomes looking at touches.

I am very aware of working in the context of systems that are breaking down; global capitalism, civil society, and the very ecosystem on which we depend to survive. Making art today feels like an attempt at an antidote; a reply to a diseased contemporary. I’m constantly pushing the “thing-ness” of what I make, as something that grounds me in an increasingly virtual world. I want to see and feel the labor of creative activity, and experience something genuine and complex, even profound; qualities that are slowly vanishing from our visual culture at large. I’d rather be sentimental than cynical, and earnest instead of clever.

Comics are another medium that I don’t understand, and don’t know how to make. They feel to me like drawing as writing, and I find them beautiful as a kind of cultural dumping ground for everything base, unserious and worthless. Those are radical qualities in our capitalist, consumerist contemporary, and I fully embrace them in the comics I manage to make. 

Adam Masterman, 2025