Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, Artists’ House Gallery

915 Spring Garden Art Studios held their Spring open studio tour April 29th, Spike the biker, Jeff the photographer and DoN converged on the fifth floor of the art studio building with the idea of visiting each floor’s artists.  The old industrial building, by the decaying aqua duct on Spring Garden Street, is divided into studio spaces and has hosted Philadelphia artists for thirty years.  For a time the studios were open only once a year, in the Fall now coinciding with Philadelphia Open Studio Tours city wide art crawl, but many artists in the building opened up for a Springtime tour offering a chance to meet the artists in their work spaces.  The first studio our trio visited was Laura D. Adams, a self described realist painter, displaying a group of paintings she had readied for an upcoming show at Artists’ House Gallery in Old City arrayed along the sunny wall of her space, offering us a great preview for her art show opening June 1st.

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios

DoN asked Laura D. Adams what she was doing to prepare for the show at Artists’ House Gallery? “I first agreed to do the show back in May, so I started preparing the work for it, really, in July.  I started doing the prep work, planning what work would be in it.  I’ve just been working steadily all year towards it, there will be some older works from last year but there will be ten or twelve new paintings.  Which is a lot for me to do in a year, I work really slowly.”

DoN questioned Laura about her realist style and if she had a theory of what’s real or not?  “Less now than before, I used to be interested in a kind of almost pushing that boundary.  Like that painting of the door that’s on the floor.  I’m not doing as much trompe l’oeil as I used to, that’s from about three years ago and last year I did some 3D sculptural paintings, they were rolls of tape where I cut them out in the shape of a roll of tape and then I painted the whole thing, all the text, price tags, to look exactly like a roll of tape.  I did four of them and then hung them on the wall.  The same kind of thing, trying to play with our perception of reality.”

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios

Is there a distinction between realism and trompe l’oeil?  Laura D. Adams said, “I kind of veered off, it’s still trompe l’oeil, in the sense that it’s really solid space, I’m still interested in really compressing the picture plane.  But I got really interested in patterns, so that’s kind of been a thing this year.  Fabric and textiles, I love detail, so that’s a way to explore a lot of detail.”

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, Artists’ House Gallery opening reception 6/1/2012.

Read about 915 Spring Garden Art Studios artist, Eric Hall on DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer

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