Adam Jester
Adam Jester was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1996. He studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in May of 2018, and received his Master of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in May of 2021. He lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Collect Bean: Are there any recurring themes or motifs in your art, and if so, what do they represent to you?
Adam Jester: Most of my work engages with or references online culture in some capacity. So much of our daily experience is mediated through screens or virtual spaces. I reference this reality in my work via projections of online-sourced images on the work’s subjects – a visual metaphor for the constant seepage of the virtual into the real.
Collect Bean: Where are you currently finding inspiration?
Adam Jester: I find that at any available moment during my morning (or nightly) routine, I am looking at my phone. While brushing my teeth, I flick through Instagram. Waiting for coffee to brew, I scroll through news headlines. Now, sitting in front of the television, I tap through several YouTube videos, eventually landing on some compilation of last night’s news. It doesn’t really matter, though, as I soon remember, I haven’t checked my email yet. I scan the room and spot the black gleam of my phone on the kitchen countertop. I retrieve it and return to the couch and sit, looking at my phone, looking at the television, looking at my apartment. Screen, to screen, to reality, back to screen. Shitposts, memes, tweets, statuses, discord calls. Online experiences that rub up against the real and intersect with it. Anime cosplayers, virtual reality, video games. How the light from a projector illuminates skin.
Collect Bean: How do you approach the balance between experimentation and consistency in your art?
Adam Jester: I consider myself a pretty slow painter, and I often approach a painting with some idea of how it “should” look once it’s finished. Because of this, it’s difficult for me to want to experiment with a painting that I’ve already been working on for months, and most of my experimentation regarding my painting occurs in the planning stage – composition, palette, drawing, etc. I still find it necessary to let loose, so I have a secondary drawing practice and a still looser, tertiary MS Paint drawing practice that I do most mornings.
Collect Bean: Are there any artists or movements that have inspired or influenced your work?
Adam Jester: I remember being stunned by Euan Uglow’s work when I first saw it. I was a student then, and it was the perfect example of great observational painting. You could learn about composition, proportion, color temperatures, and values, all from a single work. I was even more floored when I saw images of his studio chalked, carved, and marked up. Plumb lines hung everywhere, grids and reference points strewn across the studio. I had never realized you could do that, just mark a crosshair on a wall and use that to measure things in your own painting.
Collect Bean: What is something that you do to stay focused?
Adam Jester: I’ve never had very much furniture in my studio, often just an easel, a table, a painting cart, and a stool. This is sometimes inconvenient for studio visits, but it keeps me productive when I’m in the studio painting. My current studio has no WiFi and very poor cell service, which means if I want the instant gratification of looking at Twitter or Instagram, I have to wait 15 seconds or so for each post to load. The frustration of this is often enough to get me back to painting.
