While attending high school at Fort Hayes, Sara E. Adrian took part in the since-discontinued commercial art vocational program, determined to one day become an animator at Disney. This interest held until early in the artist’s tenure at CCAD when she was struck by the realization that she didn’t have the personality type required to be an illustrator.
“I don’t like making other people’s work; I like making my own,” Adrian said in a mid-October interview at 934 Gallery, where her new exhibit, “The Road,” kicks off with an opening reception on Saturday, Oct. 19. “So, I switched to Fine Arts where I studied painting and ceramics. … And funny footnote to that, when I told my advisor that’s what I wanted to do, she was like, ‘Well, it’s about time.’”
Growing up in Worthington, Adrian gravitated naturally toward crafting things, whether assembling Lego kits or creating blueprints for elaborate, Swiss Family Robinson-esque treehouses. “I totally believed it would work, and that me and my brothers would be able to live in this tree,” she said, and laughed. This trait has carried into her art career, which has seen Adrian experiment with everything from welding and kiln-firing to pouring bronze.
Part of this draw is rooted in a deep affinity for the technical aspects associated with crafting. As a child, Adrian created a comic book series populated hybrid human-animal characters, and she would reference anatomical textbooks in their invention, wanting to give birth to creatures “that could actually work.” Even with painting, part of Adrian’s fascination stems from the chemical nature of the pigments and the way the colors interact with one another on the canvas. Working with oils, for example, Adrian will paint a single layer and let it dry completely before coming back over top with another color – a technique that runs counter to the wet-on-wet method employed by artists like Bob Ross, who works quickly and paints in a single layer.
“And when you build up those layers of color, the way the eye works, when the light hits an oil painting, it goes through the layers of pigments and bounces back,” she said. “With wet-on-wet, it’s just one color, and that’s what you see. But if you look really closely at one of these [paintings], you’ll see the different layers underneath.”
Adrian is similarly drawn toward the science of pigmentation, retracing the genesis of bone black, first created by burning animal bones and grinding up the ashes, and the since-decommissioned Indian yellow, once made in rural India from the urine of cows fed a diet of mango leaves. The artist applies this accrued knowledge to each canvas, incorporating fluorescents into some portraits to lend her figures a glowing, halo-like effect, and in others working with muted tones that give the paintings a comparatively subdued feel.
“Like this one, which is a lot more muted. There’s a lot of lead white and cobalt violet in it, and the background is silver leaf that I applied and then distressed and tarnished,” she said, pointing to one of the 25 paintings on display at 934. “But I’m thinking about that while I’m working, weighing what is going in [to a piece] and the effect it will have on the other side.”
Adrian, who recently turned 50, initially embraced this exhibition, at least in part, as a means to reassess where she currently is as an artist and to determine where she might want to go from here. “The show became a weird pivot point,” she said. “I don’t want to call it a midlife crisis. It was more like, what do I want to do next? … A lot of this is stuff I’ve done in the past, and now I’m thinking about where I want to take it in the future and what I want to do with it.”
Virtually all of the works on display depict females, with most painted in a boldly iconographic light – a needed counter to the objectifying male gaze so prevalent in the art world and a means for Adrian to address numerous violences against women without portraying her subjects as victims. “That’s been done to death, and I don’t necessarily think it sends the right message to viewers,” she said, making reference to “Susanna and the Elders,” a famed painting by Artemisia Gentileschi that depicts a pair of old men leering at a young woman in the bath. “I want to get away from images like that, in an art historical sense.”
There was a point late in Adrian’s studies at CCAD that served as a breakthrough in how that artist approached her craft. At the time, she was focused on realism, imbuing her paintings with a deep understanding of anatomy and an awareness of color as it exists in a room, really dialing in on the technical aspects of artmaking. “And then I decided I wanted to break my work in order to remake it, if that makes sense,” she said, a realization that led her to create paintings that were flatter and more abstract. In the years since, her work has walked a line between these two poles, with hyper-realistic details sitting side-by-side more abstracted line work. “Through it all, I’ve definitely come to a style people recognize. … I figure your style is like your accent, where it’s going to come through no matter what you’re doing.”
Though Adrian’s canvases tend toward the serene, the inspirations are often far stormier, with the artist frequently motivated to create by the sense of anger stirred within her by a patriarchal society that often attempts to define womanhood and the public shape it should take. As a child growing up in a fairly conservative family, Adrian said there were times when her parents held her back, not allowing her to do the same things as her brothers. And these impacts reached back generations, with the artist recalling how her mother once told her that as a young girl she believed there were only four jobs available to her: teacher, secretary, housekeeper or nurse.
“And it became, like, how do I challenge this system and get around it?” said Adrian, who takes additional inspiration from her interactions with women and the deeply embedded self-doubts she found that others often carried with them. “I used to work in a hardware store, and this woman wanted to buy a towel rack, and it was just this three-piece marble tower that you screwed together, and there were no tools needed. But she insisted on buying the chipped, damaged floor model, because she could not handle putting it together, because she was a woman. And how do you tell someone with that mindset that they’re worth something? The work I do, I think, is more for them. It’s up to the men to convince menfolk that women are worth something; they’re not going to listen to me. But that’s one of the thoughts in my head. There’s not one direct narrative as to why I do this. There’s a whole collection of ideas that inform the work.”
