Today we’d like to introduce you to J. Adam McGalliard.
J. Adam, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I have been a professional, internationally exhibiting artist for over 19 years. I received an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2003 and spent the next decade living and working in NYC. For nearly four years I worked behind the scenes as an Artist Assistant for world-renowned artist Jeff Koons. I taught painting and drawing at Brooklyn College and City University of New York. I am currently the Art Director at the Foundation Academy in Jacksonville, FL. I continue to create several bodies of work for clients that live in and around the Miami area and frequent Art Miami, Art Basel and the many galleries and museums in the Wynwood Art District.
My work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museo de la Cuidad de Mexico in Mexico City, Mexico, the Cameron Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Forbes, Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, Winterrundgang der SpinnereiGalerien in Leipzig, Germany, HDLU Ring Gallery in Zagreb, Croatia and Stolen Space in London, England. Several of my paintings have been sold in auction houses including Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The toughest aspect of an artistic career is that there is no clear cut path to a successful future. There are many roads to choose from, each with their own distinct set of challenges, opportunities and required skillsets. I have taken many different roads so far on my journey, finding out first hand where my strengths were and what I truly wanted out of a creative life.
After I graduated from the New York Academy of Art, my main focus and passion was to develop my own personal style and body of work. This would take years of dedication with little promise of return while I worked countless other jobs to make ends meet. I ran around the Fabric District for a milliner making hats for The Rockettes, painted sets for Broadway productions written by Wood Allen, packed and unpacked artwork in galleries and museums, worked as an artist assistant in Jeff Koons NYC studio and taught painting and drawing courses as an Adjunct Professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY in the Heights. Over a decade of living out the quintessential “starving artist” cliché, I had finished one body of artwork and had a good start on a new series. I made my way back down South where I finally had time to round out my new found style. Seeds that were planted more than a decade before were finally beginning to bear fruit.
Tell us about your work – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I am a Contemporary Realist painter that uses traditional oil painting techniques of the Old Masters to investigate the nature of identity and reality in the digital age.
“Projections” is my most well-known body of work and has been an ongoing series, which I started towards the end of my time living and working in NYC. Sunflower Fields was the first painting in my that series. I didn’t have a clear idea of what the piece was about or that it would turn into a full body of work. The philosophy and meaning behind the series has revealed itself to me slowly overtime. The first few pieces were self-portraits. I was putting myself under the microscope and investigating my inner workings, peering into my inner thoughts and beliefs about myself and attempting to express how it feels to live in my skin. Then I began portraits of other people in the same manner. At first, I believed I was simply peeling back peoples’ masks and getting right down to the core of who they were. But what I learned throughout the creation of this series is that it was complicated. These portraits attempt to capture peoples’ true nature, but they are depictions of how I see these individuals, not necessarily their true identities. We all wear masks and personas that we tailor to fit the roles we play in our day to day lives, but the additional mechanism at play here is that every person we encounter functions as, to varying degrees, a mirror held up to our true selves. Carl Jung wrote that “All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected into our environments.”
So, what should we be on the lookout for, what’s next in store for you?
I am currently building new relationships within the art world in Miami and I am very encouraged by what I have seen developing in this region. The axis of the art world has slowly been moving away from old-guard centers like New York, Paris and Chicago for many years now. I am excited to be in this part of the country.
I typically work on more than one painting at a time, which is the case at the moment. All my work, both in the past with my Projections and Persona series and my newest series, Sojourn and Kaleidoscope, addresses multiple facets of the human condition and the ways in which we perceive reality. I believe honest art-making is a two-way street. You pull something out of the ether, out of yourself. As you cultivate the idea and it begins to take shape, it in turn shapes you, like the M.C. Escher lithograph Drawing Hands.
Sojourn is a new series depicting the various stages of the Hero’s Journey, which is a popular story-telling structure derived from Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. While my previous series displayed single figures either against a patterned background or with patterns projected on them, Sojourn will take similar themes and expand them into fully realized figures in dream imagery. In one composition, a juvenile female figure sits in a mythical landscape on the edge of a cliff above a rushing river. She appears to contemplate her reflection in a floating mirror that hovers in front of a mountainous horizon.
Kaleidoscope is another new series investigating our incessant search for pattern and meaning; combining disparate elements together in balanced compositions reminiscent of Rorschach Tests, Venn diagrams and religious mandalas. Butterflies, flowers, shells and ceramic figurines hover in orbit around an enigmatic central force like subatomic particles.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mcgalliard.net
- Email: adam@mcgalliard.net
- Instagram: @adammcgalliard
Image Credit:
Clint Eastman
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