Adam Daley Wilson — Artist’s Statement
March 2024
What I make started tumbling out when I was 42. It usually comes out fully formed — a bolt — so what I practice isn’t what to make — it’s how to catch it. I started practicing with just black letters on regular paper, then small white canvases, and then white letters on color images on larger canvases. Later, whole paragraphs started coming out. So I started practicing how to keep up, and how to fit everything, which turned out to be with oil sticks on giant canvases, black and white. So when I say I have a practice, it’s finding good ways to show what is coming out.
But this isn’t always true. Sometimes what comes out is too much. It has to be unpacked. So for these I started practicing how to hold an idea for a long time, even months, or a year, and use that other part of my mind, where nothing comes out instantly, and just I think. And try to feel-think-listen.
Turns out these have a second bolt — I see how to make it, I drop everything to do it. My studio is my hallway — so I can make these anytime, day or night. These are the huge oil sticks that look abstract. So a bolt of thought, then months of long being with it, then another bolt, of how to make it, and I make these in minutes. After, I’m out of breath and sweating and have blisters and sometimes tears.
I practice teaching myself how to make what comes out, and materials, and the history of artists here and other places. I’m self-taught. I went to school for other things. I never imagined this would happen. It just started tumbling out.
Which brings us, I guess, to why this is all happening. It started after a change in my psychiatric meds, when I was 42, ten years ago, for my bipolar 1. Since then, with my psychiatrist watching close, I’ve been in a hypomania highs. Except during the depressions.
In my hypomanias, things come out in bolts, and after that it’s trying to catch it. It takes practice.
I was told once, “your mind’s like a honeybee, you go from flower to flower, and then you make honey, like no one else, things no one else can see.”
I like having a different mind, even as it needs twelve pills a day to treat. But what I make is not about any of that. It’s about what I see. For random reasons of electrical currents and chemistry in certain neurons in my brain, I just feel and see things differently.
So if this is your fix, you might not quite find it anywhere else.
It’s fine to use big art words for all this, and I can do that if you really want. But simple words are best. It tumbles out of my head, when my head is running high, and since then it’s been lots of trying and practice to catch up.
— Adam