Interview with artist Adam Fulwiler
Adam Fulwiler, originally from Wisconsin, recently earned an MFA in painting from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Adam’s paintings are abstractions that explore the psychology of communication and transformation. He is a recipient of a 2022 Windgate Foundation Accelerator Grant and also works as a Studio Educator for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. More of Adam’s work can be found at James May Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and MIXD Gallery in Rogers, Arkansas and at his website adamfulwiler.com.
AAS: Adam, first of all, congratulations on earning an MFA in painting in May from UAF. But you earned your BA in studio art from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Are you originally from that part of the country?
AF: Thank you! Yes, I earned my BA from the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay in 2017. I grew up in that area and spent the majority of my life in Wisconsin before moving to Fayetteville, Arkansas in 2019 for graduate school.
AAS: Why did you choose UAF to work toward an MFA?
AF: During the time I was applying to graduate programs I was working for a small contemporary gallery, James May Gallery, on the coast of Lake Michigan. I had finished all the applications to the schools I had on my list and the gallery director suggested I check out the program at UA. She happened to know a faculty member and cited the generous funding the program provided. Quite honestly, I knew nothing about the program at UA (or Arkansas for that matter) and was shocked when I looked it up and saw the funding, studios, and other opportunities the program provided to its MFA students. I also wanted a 3-year program and a guaranteed graduate assistantship with the option of teaching. UA turned out to be all of that and more.
AAS: Growing up, did you always know you wanted to be an artist?
AF: Growing up, I always knew I wanted to work with my hands to some degree. I spent my childhood helping my father with renovations around the house and drawing whenever I had the opportunity. My dad started his career in graphic design (he also received his degree from the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay) so there was certainly some creative energy in the house. I initially dreamt about being an architect until middle school when I realized the amount of math and physics that goes into designing a building. Early in my time in middle school, music became a huge part of my life. I began playing trumpet and later on started a ska band with several of my best high school friends. We toured quite a bit and played full-time until disbanding to all attend university. During that time however, I was painting a lot and started showing my work while in my junior year of high school. Music, particularly jazz, has always been a huge influence on my studio practice.
“I want my paintings to feel like they are caught in between stillness and motion.”
AAS: Let’s talk about some of your thesis work. It is a wonderful collection of quite varied abstract paintings – but they are interconnected by bold color and bold shapes. Tell me about your thesis exhibition.
MFA Thesis Exhibition As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree, Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas
AF: Thank you so much! My thesis exhibition titled As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree was installed at the Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas in early March of 2022. The show contained somewhere around 50 paintings. It was a very big show, and I am so happy with how it came together. The show was a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation. The work as a whole was created to reflect on my childhood spend with my brother who experiences sensory differences due to autism. In my work for that show and the paintings I am working on now, I seek to establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I seek to invite the viewer into the act of slow looking – to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.
Sun Kissed / La Grande Jatte, acrylic and spray paint on sewn canvas, 80” x 57” (two sided)
The two-sided paintings such as Sun Kissed / La Grande Jatte seek to create a more temporal experience than the stationary work that is hung on the wall. They require the body to move around them to be seen and to compare the relationships between the opposing sides. The paintings were suspended from the ceiling with an apparatus that allowed them to spin slowly in response to the air’s circulation in the room and the passage of viewers around the piece. The result was an ever-changing relationship with the space as a whole and the paintings that are seen past or through the painting you are focused on. The two-sided paintings are constructed on a sewing machine. Introducing the sewing machine into my studio practice was an exciting development and created a large shift in the speed of my making. Unlike a painting where the ‘parts’ are arrived at in the process, the sewn works ‘parts’ are created, mocked up, and planned before sewing together in their final form.
AAS: One of my favorite pieces is My Window has Grown Illegible. You’ve created a painting that triggers different emotions as the eye moves around the piece. Tell me about that painting.
My Window has Grown Illegible, oil on canvas, 60” x 40”
Cast, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 16”
AF: The painting My Window has Grown Illegible was playing around with a system I began implementing into my practice during lockdown. I was bringing paintings in progress outside and recording cast shadows that fell onto the surface. I would then bring the painting back into the studio and paint the cast shadows as if they were affecting the local color. A prime example of a painting that was made during that time is Cast. Each time a cast shadow overlays a previous cast shadow I would key up the saturation and value of the new color.
With the painting My Window has Grown Illegible, I wanted to use that system but allow for moments where the system breaks down or gets negated by a large gesture. In certain quadrants of this painting, (the small yellow quadrant in the upper middle, for example) an observational-based color shift is taking place whereas in the quadrant below (indigo, pink, orange) it becomes almost like a colored light source is casting a shape. A lot of the forms come from cast shadows of leaves, branches, or architectural objects. I was lucky enough to have some really large windows in my graduate studio, so I was constantly aware of the changing light and shadow entering my space much as I was when stuck inside during lockdown. The bottom left of the painting was a cast shadow of my brushes that were sitting on my taboret while working on the painting.
AAS: Tender Grid #4 is quite a different painting and even though the colors are more vibrant, it is not at all jarring. I just don’t get tired of looking at it. Congratulations on that one, especially.
Tender Grid #4, oil on paper, 30” x 28”
Connect / Disconnect / Reset, acrylic on canvas, 77” x 132”
AF: The ongoing series of Tender Grid paintings is a somewhat recent development in my practice. My work was already hugely motivated by color, and I began to find myself asking “can color be the subject?”. I began to make these colored grid paintings treating the color and shapes as a figure. There are moments in the Tender Grid paintings that the directional mark-making subtly changes the hue of a color when viewed at an oblique angle and sometimes even creates a continuation of a shape located adjacent. One of the largest paintings in my thesis exhibition, Connect / Disconnect / Reset, appears to have been created quickly, but required long extended periods of contemplation before making a move.
In these paintings, I was cautious to not allow the grid to become mechanical or removed from my hand. I wanted the grids to seem friendly, solicitous, and provide the opportunity to create a very real sense of negotiation between two shapes of color placed next to each other thus either reaffirming the optical effect those colors already had or creating a tension between the optical and the physical. The grid-of-the-hand also allows there to be a clear sense of process. The shapes bend, squash, squeeze, and pull other shapes inhabiting adjacent space. Shapes seem as though they may not be in the same location next time if you take your eyes off the painting for a moment. You can often see, around the edge of the topmost layer, the residue from previous colors that are now below. Tessellating, seeping bodies of color mingle and levitate, resulting in lifted, sometimes dissonant harmonies. These relationships and reactions occur simultaneously like an entire improvisational jazz arrangement played as the receiver encounters each pitch and chord of color.
AAS: When you are creating your abstracts, what do you think about as you paint? Are you following a plan or it is spontaneous?
AF: As I have talked about in some of the above questions, I often do start the paintings with a preconceived idea or system, but I do not let that get in the way of a painting shifting in a way I may not initially expect. My process is a combination of systematic rules, aleatory, and call and response. I want the painting to feel alive when finished and to have that happen, I must allow the painting to be alive when making. Being attentive to the changeable and expansive nature of painting is an important aspect of my studio practice.
On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon, acrylic, spray paint, colored pencil, and sewn canvas on canvas, 66” x 77”
There are three main values that I seek to uphold in the studio: slowness, openness, and liveliness. All these values present themselves in many different formats. Slowness could mean the painting was created slowly perhaps inviting the viewer to spend more time dissecting the surface, or slowness could be contained in a painting that was created rapidly but possesses qualities that force a more temporal engagement. Openness stems from my love for jazz and poetry; two other mediums that require slowness and consideration to be fully experienced and created. I hunt for moments in the painting that provide a multiplicity of potential meanings which the viewer must hunt and find. These ‘easter eggs’ provide an opportunity for a work to play out completely differently during each viewing session.
The quality of liveliness is something these elements work together to achieve. I want my paintings to feel like they are caught in between stillness and motion. If you look away too long the whole image could change, elements might seem to be falling or floating off the canvas or just barely being held up against the surface by a strong wind behind your back. I see the painting On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon being an example of this mantra. Spatial relationships and potential meanings seem to shift with every glance, suggestive of my own experiences reading imaginative and poetic writers like Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Jorge Luis Borges.
AAS: Just Barely is another captivating painting. I especially like the incorporation of texture to keep things exciting and the viewer off guard.
Just Barely, oil on canvas, 10” x 8”
AF: Just Barely is an earlier painting from 2019. My research at that time was rooted in autobiographical memory recollection. I was testing the limits of the factual remembrance of memories. I would allow myself 45 seconds to recall a memory and draw shapes that I felt represented a thing, place, sensation, or a position a body in the memory may have been in. I thus took that codex of shapes and created several paintings that coincided with that memory.
The texture of this painting was coming from a pastry bag with a cake decorator's tip in it. During high school, I worked at a Dairy Queen for five years and decorated cakes there. While considering the materiality of paint I decided to treat it like frosting and stuff it into a pastry bag. I was excited about how I could use it as a drawing tool and create an object-like mark on the canvas that also cast a shadow when lit obliquely.
AAS: Then there is Without Fear of Wind or Vertigo. Here again you’ve created something energizing and crazy interesting.
Without Fear of Wind or Vertigo, acrylic, sewn canvas, and spray paint on canvas over panel, 24” x 24”
Without Fear of Wind or Vertigo (detail)
AF: This painting places me in a state of hyper-sensory overload, but it also excites – almost like you have had too much coffee or are trapped in a mosh-pit. I was playing around with the idea of creating paintings that have a maze-like composition or almost feel like some sort of weird game of Plinko. If you dropped a ball from the top, you would end up in a different place every time. In this painting, you can also see some moments of sewing creep in (see detail). Sewing becomes a moment to bring in a widely understood visual tactility. Similar to the negotiation between shapes and colors in the tender grid paintings, the sewn works raise the notion of linking. Sewing and collage also allow me to combine materials that don’t necessarily mix such as oil pastel with water-based media and graphite on raw paper with thickly painted acrylic. The sewn method of attachment can allow for more forceful combinations.
AAS: What do you think were the most helpful things you learned while you worked toward your MFA?
AF: 1. Everything is fair game. 2. Take risks. 3. Uncertainty is a tool.
AAS: You are one of the 2022 recipients of a Windgate Accelerator Grant. Tell me about that program.
AF: Yes, upon graduation in May I received the news that I was one of ten graduating students from the University of Arkansas to receive a Windgate Accelerator Grant. It is a $10,000 grant that can be used in any way to further your studio practice or professional career. It has allowed me to pay my studio rent at Mount Sequoyah, purchase supplies, and set up a small shop in my garage to build frames and stretchers.
AAS: What can we expect next from you, Adam?
AF: Well, currently I have work installed at Oven & Tap in Bentonville, and the newly opened MIXD Gallery in Rogers. Several of the paintings we talked about in this interview are installed there. I am working on a new body of work in the studio that I plan to show in the near future. I want to say thank you to several important people who have supported me along the way – Kristy Deetz (undergraduate painting professor) for giving me the confidence to go for it, Allison Hobbs (curator of MIXD gallery) for being a huge supporter of my work early in my graduate program, my entire thesis committee (Sam King, Neil Callander, David Andree, Kara Andree, and Abra Levenson) for their mentorship, feedback, and support, my parents for their encouragement, and my wife Hannah for moving all the way to Arkansas and being there every step of the way (and for proofreading and editing hundreds of papers).
