Adam Licsko, a 36 year-old Californian, has been painting professionally since late 2000. His works portray an incisive perception of the world around him as he brings to both urban life and natural settings an acute awareness of his audience. He explores a triad between the viewer’s perspective and dualities on the canvas, emphasizing the contrasts between light and shadow, cool and warm colors, beauty and its opposite, but always exploring them as they would be seen by the observer. Unsurprisingly, a common reaction to his work is the feeling that one is actually inside the painting itself.
Within five years of his professional debut, his unique minimalist style attracted an international following and critical acclaim. He has corporate collections with Nissan, Amgen Cancer Research Institute, Seagate Technologies, Raytheon, Loyola Marymount University, and State Farm to name a few. Paintings he has donated have raised many thousands of dollars for charities, including Central Coast Wine Classic and The Ventana Wildlife Society for the California Condor. Most recently (2011) Licsko has been a featured artist at “Love, Faith, Shame, and Hope,” a group show at which his paintings featured next to those of Tissot, Dali, Warhol, and Rembrandt among others..
Licsko also loves drawing and is known to nearly live in his sketchbooks. “I am unable stop…” he says. “Whether I’m scribbling, scratching the paper or even pulling a piece of charcoal out of the fire pit and drawing on concrete.”
When he’s not painting or drawing, Adam is an inventor and designer. In 2005, after a back injury, he designed and received a patent for a simple device that maintains proper posture while carrying heavy or awkward loads. He has also worked freelance, as a co-designer, on a project with George Lucas’s ILM along with many other conceptual design projects through the years.
Today, Licsko paintings intensify his own struggle to “know himself,” and to express the world as he sees it. He has begun to explore an even deeper connection with his audience, touching upon more human subject matter and dipping into social commentary. He has begun to consider how he sees the world and the questions that preoccupy art and the artist. “What is humanity at its core? Do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel? In this way are we not all connected?”
