MERRICK ADAMS Suspended in Love and Longing, 2025, 60 x 96”, Acrylic on panel.
The ocean: that vast body which conjures in us a primordial fear of an endless expanse—the unknown and the unknowable. Sigmund Freud used the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to a sensation of eternity, of being one with the entire external world prior to the fragmentation of the mind occasioned by becoming an individual; the ocean is a poignant metaphor for the unknowable depths of the unconscious.
Merrick Adams’s layered paintings of the ocean plumb its depth through an aesthetic exploration of its surface. Drawing from woodcut and silkscreen techniques, Adams uses eclectic methods to render the ocean’s surface in pristine pulses of briny blues; oranges and reds hint at the reflections of sunsets dancing on the ocean’s waves. The nets that ripple across the paintings surfaces are matrices through which Adams personal histories—memories fishing with his father, a former commercial fisherman—the metaphor of the ocean as the unconscious, and the history of printmaking are enveloped in the ceaseless waves of an ocean expanding endlessly beyond the frame.
This summer, Adams spent time traveling along the Gulf of California, breathing salty air and reading John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The painting’s titles are drawn directly from Steinbeck’s meditations on the connections between the sea and the mind. In 1951 atop a marine research vessel called the Western Flyer, and with images of the sea’s surface fresh in his mind, Steinbeck wrote: “…[T]he ocean, deep and black in the depths, is like the low dark levels of our minds in which the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea,