Ball Point Pen Paintings by Shane MCAdams

Shane McAdams creates beautiful ghostly multi-toned image that forces the viewers to question what is artificial and what is organic.
His work push the boundaries of ballpoint pen ink through dueling relationships between natural and synthetic forms.

Like the stratified rock on the Navajo reservation, where I spent much of my childhood, the forms in my work are often analogs to the methods of their creation. They take root in the physical properties inherent within specific, mundane materials such as Elmer’s glue, correction fluid, ballpoint pen ink and resin, whose limits are stretched by subjecting them to non-traditional applications, generating structures whose complexity belies the elegance of their creation. This process reflects the physical forces that are constantly working to fashion and sculpt the natural landscape, and, by bracketing these forms with hand-rendered and conventionalized images, I hope to evoke the duality between the actual and the artificial as it is conveyed through idealized representations of order and beauty.