Adrienne Pike

 
Artist Biography

Adrienne Pike Adelphia is a contemporary oil and watercolor painter with her studio located in America’s heartland.  Pike, a Midwest farmer’s daughter, declared herself an artist at the age of seven.  She was born in Ottawa, Illinois, and grew up in the woods outside of Illinois’s Starved Rock State Park.  With a love for the outdoors, Pike has always been passionate about nature and is inspired and fascinated by the way spirit moves in all things.

Adrienne received her degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; where she studied painting, ceramic sculpture, hot glass, metals and serigraphy. Pike provides art lessons and instruction at her studio.  She is the current President of the Ottawa Art League and is also a member of the Kendall Arts Guild, Chicago Artists Coalition and the Transparent Watercolor Society.

Artist Statement

Water is Life and Life is Art.  Art is how I live my life. Satisfaction comes from creating things with my hands.  I paint with oil and watercolors, hand-build ceramic sculptures and blow glass.

My studio practice is based on and influenced by nature.  I have a deep love of the outdoors and am influenced, inspired and fascinated by the way spirit moves through all things. I spend many of the spring, summer and fall months outdoors observing and photographing what I experience while habitually picking up bits of nature—shells, rocks and bones—taking fragments of the outside world back into my studio to create.

Water is a recurring theme throughout my work, just as it is essential to life. My paintings delve into ideas of life’s frailty, the importance of water to existence on this planet and more recently, the ripple effect…how one small thing can change everything else around it. My work encompasses the small, subtle details and the delicate things in daily life that are seldom noticed. My work is loosely organic with an artistic twist. I create abstraction from nature that is filtered through my experience. 

My current body of oil paintings focus on the ripples that raindrops make in puddles, the way that water swells when you throw a stone in a pond or the manner in which trees, plants and light are reflected on water. I build my strainers and wrap the canvas or I work on gallery wrap pre-stretched canvases. Lately, I have been priming with black gesso and working with cold wax medium and palette knives.

My recent watercolors suggest figures mingling with nature—figures that are ambiguous but recognizable to the viewer—creating a relationship between the two.  I use Arches 140lb and 300lb cold press paper that I do not stretch until the painting is finished. My hand-built ceramic sculptures portray indistinguishable figures or figments of nature which I glaze with oxides to obtain earthy hues.  And, when working with glass, I lean towards organic shapes and let the medium tell me what it wants to be—rather than trying to create a faultless object.

I use my thoughts and knowledge and the canvas, paper, clay, or glass to depict my subject. My artistic process involves interacting with my evolving work and letting it lead me to a more complete representation of my experience.

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