Deidre McAdam - Biography

Biography

When I was 8 years old my parents enrolled me in art classes at our community center in our small town in the Midwest. When I was a teenager, they let me take the train into Chicago for summer drawing classes at the Art Institute. When I was enrolled in junior college in southern California, I was more interested in learning how to batik and make dress patterns than I was in my required courses. Making a living as an artist was not an option so I had a career in working and playing with other people’s children. I was a Special Education teacher, high school counselor, and high school administrator in Tucson, Arizona. I retired and moved to Taos, New Mexico but after two years I missed kids, so I went back to work as the Director of Taos Charter School for 5 years. After retiring again, I spent a year walking in the woods to clear my head of 40 years of being an educator, creating space for what was next. Big surprise, it was making art!

I spent many years painting in oils until I saw my first silk painting. My head exploded from all the vibrant colors. I gave away all my oil painting supplies and invested in silk painting materials. Just as I was getting started, I was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphatic cancer in my cheek. I went through a course of targeted radiation and after 8 months I was cancer free. So, cancer and silk painting for me are deeply enmeshed. Cancer destroyed my illusion that everything would be OK and introduced me to chaos, fear, ambiguity, death, fragility and reaching out without shame or fear. For brief moments I experienced the divine connection between unpredictable joy and unpredictable tragedy. Cancer taught me to get out of the way and to nurture a felt but unseen collaboration while painting.

Artist Statement

Painting on silk is a medium and technique practiced for centuries in Asia. Silk, a protein created by silk worms, reflects light. The shimmering, luminescent qualities of silk are due to the prism- like structure of silk fibers. The French dyes are transparent, no matter how many layers of dye in a painting, the vibrancy of the silk shines through the dye. After the painting is complete, it is rolled up in paper and hung in a steamer to steam for 3 hours to fix the dye. The painting is mounted on a frame of cotton batting to protect the silk.

Painting with French dyes on Chinese Crepe de Chine silk is a dance between imposing control and risking chaos. The flow and spread of the dye is controlled by lines drawn with a resist, a water-based gutta. The silk is stretched and suspended in a frame, the gutta lines are drawn, the dye is brushed onto the silk. So much can happen within these lines! I love the control of color within the lines, and I love the risk of painting with color and brush stokes without the guardrails of the resist lines, eager to see what happens. To be in the presence of such intense, vibrant color is disorienting, inspiring and over-stimulating. It is a  joyous journey of learning by doing.