Artist 339
Adam Lupton
Oil painting
Adam Lupton (born 1987) is a Canadian artist who specialises in painting where his motifs explores personal and social psychology in our contemporary society. He draw on his lived experiences with OCD using painterly visual languages to explore the internal and external narrative of psychology. He currently lives and works between Berlin and Brooklyn.
He documents and explores how his every day is filled with performing mental and physical rituals, endlessly seeking assurance, and repeating mantras and projections in his thoughts that mediate between him and the exterior world.
By painting various variations and alternative versions of himself to express the familiar-but-off in some way situations the unfolding emotions and actions of his OCD become clear. Lupton works with non-traditional methods of paint application: using stamps, printmaking, and craft applications to express the varied, repetitive, and frantic emotions of intrusive thoughts.
These applications mediate between him and the painting, much like OCD mediates between him and his world. And later how the painting translates and mediates between the viewer and the painting.
Through this lens, the work weaves together individual and societal rituals, spiritual tension, and self-defining myth, thereby illuminating the various attempts at and desires for clarity.
“You see all these possible futures, how each little decision is going to impact not just that moment but over time, lead farther and farther away from another choice, but they're all able to be traced back to that one decision. I suppose I was trying to convey that: the aspect of time that's fluid but also monumental for us who only live time in one direction." - Adam Lupton
These overlaps create narratives that play out on the canvas. Lupton casts a depictions of the world of anxiety though questions of identity, masculinity, ego, modern-day loneliness, domesticity, and mental health– drawing on Greek myths, religious rituals, rock lyrics, modern dating plights, domestic routines, history, introspection, sexuality, and compulsions – to do so.
When asked if Lupton sees art as a form of self-therapy they explain, “For me, limitedly. I don’t think it really works things out for me, but it forces me to articulate some feelings and emotions, or discover that, yes, that is something I should probably talk to a professional about. But it’s not cathartic - it’s a way to live with it all and steal some positive from it.”
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