Dee Adams’ history as an artist spans the worlds of traditional art, graphic design, advertising design, and technical illustration.

Born in the US, Dee spent time studying art and biochemistry at Ithaca College and Cornell University originally pursuing a career as one of the top scientific technical illustrators in her field.

Seduced by the world of graphic design and advertising, Dee went on to San Francisco to work for such companies as Yahoo!, Microsoft, Disney, and various media and film studios. It wasn’t until several years ago that Dee made her way back onto the traditional art scene with shows in both San Francisco and New York. Her style has been described as contemporary bold minimalism with an edginess inspired by technology.

“I like to reinterpret complicated images or objects by simplifying them down to basic colour and shape. To me it’s just a way of making sense of the things in my world at a time when we seem so deeply saturated and overexposed to media.”

Now residing in Sydney Australia, Dee has become the founder of deedee9:14, the direct online outlet for her unique and contemporary paintings. Frequent travels to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, London, and New York provide the inspiration for the bold and brilliant colour schemes in her pieces. Major clients and patrons of Dee’s work are located around the world in such cities as New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Singapore, Chicago, London, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney.

Artist Statement:

One of the things people always say about me is that my handwriting is too neat. The other thing they say about me is that I'm probably an obsessive compulsive. I don't know that I can disagree.
As a kid I always colored inside the lines. Never going beyond the lines, over it, or banging into it...just touching up against it softly and neatly. I worried my mother when I would colour an entire page with one singular marker stroke made up of perfectly parallel lines.
I'd sit at the kitchen table writing meaningless paragraphs over and over until every line, every letter, matched in height, width, and form.

Now people say my condition, my compulsion towards simplicity and perfection serves me well.
The lines you see in my paintings are not masked. They are all done free-hand, painstakingly and lovingly. I do not use an airbrush nor any type of masking technique, instead choosing brushes and meticulous hand edging techniques.
Technically, I'm old-fashioned European. Formally, up-to-the-minute. It's all there- smoldering beneath the surface, a slow steady burn: the desire to know what two colors side-by-side and other combinations of visual elements look like, the desire to create quality that will sustain beyond the immediate, the desire to manufacture a pure experience, the desire to touch perfection. I paint because I am obsessed with the idea of simplifying.
It can be argued that abstract art offers a more personal account of the artist; the work is a manifestation of the deeply personal and constructs an empathetic bridge to the emotional and intellectual perception of the audience. The abstract painter makes a critical assessment of the aesthetic conventions attributed to realism and seeks to mutate or evolve such conventions to establish a personalised view of the world. It is a synthesis of retinal properties (what is seen), emotional response (what is felt) and intellectual perception (what is thought) that provides the compositional structure.

Abstraction provides a form of representation and expression that attempts to go beyond what is seen, stripping away recognisable form to declare a personal response to the world. Abstraction is the distillation of feelings, intuition and intellect to construct new visual forms. It celebrates the act of painting (and sculpture), where gesture, and colour and mark key elements of this visual convention. Abstraction is a visual language of the transcendental in which realism is negated in favour of a deeper representation of the world.