Adam Masterman

Adam Masterman works in both comics and painting to explore intersections between the personal, the technological and the imaginary, crafting work that examines the creative process in the digital age. His paintings feature personal images filtered through both digital media and traditional painting processes, creating a painterly vocabulary that incorporates pop culture, art history and his own personal repertoire of mark-making. Adam studied painting at Bates College, graduating in 2000. Since that time, he has pursued both a painting and a comics making practice while teaching elementary school in Western Maine. His comics have been published by Dark Horse, ComixTribe and other publishers, and his first graphic novel is serialized on Webtoon. His paintings have been exhibited in local art festivals, and belong to several private collections. Adam received his MFA at the Maine College of Art & Design in 2024.


A teacher once told me that the “problem of painting is the problem of two-dimensionality,” a description I love, aside from the fact that “problem” has a negative connotation. The problem here is actually the source of everything that is captivating about the art of painting: bringing experiences that happen in depth to a surface, and all of the possible permutations that that translation entails. Paint on a surface always seems to wrestle with the basic tension between looking like paint, and looking like something else; what (theoretically) is one thing seems to be divided in two. I am less interested in blurring that line than in bringing these two modes into conversation. Paint moves through real space, pushing and sliding across a plane, describing and also interrupting another space that is itself constructed by paint. Gesture implies the figure of the artist, while content creates an object for that same subject. Colors both refer to external situations of light and texture, and sit on the surface as themselves. Ultimately, two very different and contradictory possibilities for what paint is have to cooperate. My paintings are created through a hybrid of digital and traditional techniques, with images that cite the visual vernacular of life in the digital age. The act of seeing is filtered through the digital, and then merged with the act of painting; as much as possible (and in as many ways as possible) they are “paintings of painting.”