Adam Sensel Bio/Artist Statement

My home and studio are in the Greensboro, North Carolina area.  My focus is oil painting on stretched canvas with brush.  I have developed a style that blends the processes from digital media/graphic design, silk screen printing and oil painting.  I love my process, it is a steering force and guide, garnering me full control, providing tangible progression marks and as someone who is naturally inquisitive, possibly even hyperactive, it offers me the variety that my jack of all trades mindset needs.  I am inspired by the exuberant colors of Van Goh and Kehinde Wiley, the raw unsettling abstraction of Francis Bacon and Edward Hopper’s and Édouard Manet’s capturing and deciphering of real life.

My Paintings are an exploration of my mind’s eye, a stylized reality presented as oil on canvas paintings.  The Bardo, a Buddhist term, is the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth, according to Tibetan tradition.  I like to describe my works as “paintings from the bardo”.  For me the bardo is a tangible place, a place where fine details become muddled, unimaginable shapes morph out of the concrete forms.  A place I can build and create abstracted scenes of what I see and have seen into beautiful works that assault the eyes with loud colors and a myriad of textures.  My works are an extension of my psyche and what I imagine our reality looks like from this other side.  I imagine this other side to have qualities that cause a kind of sensory overload. The blurriness for the eyes, the thick texturized paint begging to be touched and loud colors with harsh transitions screaming for attention, these aim to make my Bardo visible.