Adam Shaw

He will frequently work on a painting for an entire day, later to completely scrape off all the paint that was applied, leaving only remnants of the paint that found its way into previously gouged out areas. He works like this over the course of years to build a single painting, with its layers mostly never seen by the viewer though they impart a sense of history. Throughout the process the use of language — written, painted, or scraped into the paint — is actively employed, expressing poetic, philosophical and personal messages, most of which get covered over or remain as fragmentary relics.

In his early career, Shaw would often work on a single piece over many months, spending hours “just looking” interspersed with outbursts of painterly activity. At the time he was generally regarded as a “color field” painter. However, in the 1990s and beyond he became preoccupied with dense textural surfaces and his work habits evolved to exploring the development of an entire body of work simultaneously, with as many as 20 paintings in varying degrees of process. In creating his paintings he uses brushes, sticks, rags, pouring, sanding, grinding, scraping, etc., working both on the easel and the floor inside his studio in the Sonoma wine country north of San Francisco, as well as outside where his paintings often bake in the sun.

Adam Shaw was born in New York City. He has been painting his entire life and began working with oils in the mid-1970s. He was educated in the Renaissance tradition, receiving a BA in Classics, with a minor in Russian and Italian. In 1979 and 1980 he lived in Italy, in Florence and Urbino, studying art history. In 1981 he moved to San Francisco to pursue a master's degree in Poetics. Following that he became a physician and was in private practice for 14 years. He has taught workshops and lectured at numerous institutions, including Palmer College and the College of Marin. He has published a number of his own poems and has translated poetry from Latin, Russian and Italian.

Adam Shaw (born 1957) is an American painter. Shaw's work has been widely exhibited in the United States. His work is in hundreds of private and corporate collections throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, including the Bank of America, The Gap, Marriott Hotels and eBay Corporation.