Adrienne Pike Adelphia

 
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. 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.  I take the knowledge and fragments of the outside world back to my studio and create. 

Water is a reoccurring 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 inconsequential things in daily life that are seldom noticed.  My paintings are loosely organic with a painterly twist.  I create abstraction from nature while filtering experience. 

My current body of oil paintings focuses on the ripples that raindrops make in puddles, the way that water swells when you throw a stone in a pond or the manner that trees, plants and light are reflected on water.  My recent watercolors understand figures mingling with nature.

As far as processes go— sometimes I build my stretchers and wrap the canvas and others I buy and work on gallery wrap pre-stretched canvases with my oils.  When working with watercolors I use Arches 140lb and 300lb cold press paper that I do not stretch until the painting is finished. I draw on the canvas or paper my idea—but usually through the process of painting I will change my mind and take the drawing another direction.  I work solo.