Neal Adams was born in Dallas, Texas. He spent his childhood through High School years in the central Texas town of Temple. Adams graduated with a BFA with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. Then moved to Houston in 1980. Neal’s primary discipline was drawing/painting with some work in sculpting and writing. He passed away in 2013. In Houston, in 1986 he cofounded Applewhite/Adams Design, specializing in graphic design for corporations. In 2002 he opened his own design studio. He has had solo exhibits of his work at Texas A&M University and in Houston. His paintings have been selected for many juried shows, including the Sixteenth Annual International Juried Exhibition (New York 1998), Tenth National (New York 1999), Texas National 2000 (Nacogdoches 2000), Open Show (Houston 1998 and 2001), and The Big Show (Houston 2002). He also designed sets and backdrop paintings for Houston choreographer Sandra Organ Solis.
I view art as process. The goal is not a whole, but a disclosure. I think this is true in life. We often seek, and long to see, life as units with full resolution. My experience has always been that events are connected with the past and affect the future. Things are never settled and life remains dynamic. My aim is to further Non-objective abstraction, which I believe is still in its infancy yet offers the greatest expressive potential. As a painter, I am working in space. But the space I use, a piece of paper or canvas, does not consist of edge dimensions or the material surface. It is a conceptual arena. An arena defined as a sphere of activity or influence within which an event or simultaneous events can happen. Events from which anything can develop. The event creates its own rules – its own algorithms. These rules are principally based on interactions between elements. For example, how elements attract or repel, how they are connected and cross-connected, how they carry content. The interactions form the event. So the arena can also be thought of as a state space, a range of possible interactions. The primary value of the elements in the state space is their interconnection. How they define space is secondary. The interaction between elements contains the ability to display the reality in which we live and how we live as humans. The content of a work is held within the event. This method of creating a work has lead me to the use of visual algorithms. By this term I mean common rules of analysis involving the repetition of an operation. As I work, I make visual decisions that carry out the algorithm. The decisions are simultaneously both intuitive and deductive, as well as felt and thought. I seldom plan or have an image in mind before I begin. The process begins with a stroke or two. These initial marks are the catalyst that sets the algorithm’s pattern. The elements that follow unfold concomitant with the pattern. This process allows me to grapple with the complex range of human emotion, awareness and depth.
Neal Adams
2006